Service interface mediator model for interoperability of heterogeneous operation center systems

Abstract

In an organization that has heterogeneous system, interoperability is the most important aspect to ensure the information is exchanged effectively. Application developers are usually adopting single Service Interface Design (SID) approach which is not a solution for all situations in Heterogeneous System Integration (HSI) due to its limited integration with System Integration Patterns (SIP). To address the interoperability issues, interfacing processes need to be simplified and formed as a unified service interface at the initial design stage covering SIP on the aspects of File-Based, Common Database, Remote Procedure Call, Socket, Distributed Objects, and Web Services. This study reviewed three prominent approaches related to SID namely Method-Oriented, Message-Oriented and Resource-Oriented. Thus, this study proposed a Service Interface Mediator (SIMed) model comprising the three SID approaches as a centralized Federated Service Interface schema. The model enables two or more types of service interface schema from different SIP to be mapped and matched for the purpose of sharing services among the heterogeneous systems, as such, providing high interoperability for HSI. In addition, Service Interface Signature schema used to validate service interface type during mapping process was also developed based on SID types. A comparative analysis between SID approaches and SIP was carried out to verify how effective both of them can work together. The results showed that the SID approaches were able to interoperate with all types of the SIP. The results were also supported by two types of validation that were carried out to prove the SIMed's capability. First, the interview with industry experts who used to be involved in HSI had given 97.5% score marks; second, the testing of SIMed prototype had reached maximum precision and maximum recall. In conclusion, the proposed SIMed model is able to mitigate the interoperability issues of heterogeneous system.