Challenging the interoperability industry with MDA between computers in and SOA

The global market is willing to improve their competitiveness through collaborative work and partnerships, motivating the companies to look for enhanced interoperability between computer systems and applications. However, the large number of system's heterogeneity and the company's lack of resources and know-show have been preventing organizations to move ahead in that direction. Today, the OMG's model-driven architecture (MDA) makes available an open approach to write specifications and develop applications, separating the application and business functionality from the platform technology. As well, the service-oriented architecture (SOA) establishes a software architectural concept that defines the use of services to support the requirements of software users, making them available as independent services accessible in a standardized way. Together, these two architectures seem to provide a suitable framework to improve company's competitiveness through the adoption of a standard-based extended environment, challenging and enhancing the interoperability between computer systems and applications in industry. The paper, after illustrating the general motivations the industrial SMEs have to adopt open architectures to achieve interoperability for extended and collaborative enterprise practices, presents the emerging model-driven and service-oriented architectures. Then, it describes an innovative case study in validation by the industry, proposing a standard-based extendable platform to support an interoperable environment through the adoption of MDA and SOA. The paper finishes with discussion and concluding remarks concerning the empirical results obtained from the pilot demonstrator. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.