Rapid Systems of Systems Integration - Combining an Architecture-Centric Approach with Enterprise Service Bus Infrastructure

Abstract

Rapid, yet methodical, systems of systems integration is in high demand. Application areas such as homeland security and disaster response add to the challenge because of a unique set of integration requirements; three examples are: (1) a high demand for flexibility with respect to the configuration and support of business processes to anticipate and cater to changing threat and mitigation scenarios, (2) high agility demands during both development and production to address legacy and emergent capabilities, processes, applications and technologies, (3) wide variety of trust relationships among and across stakeholders and their organizations. In this paper we report on an approach for balancing challenging integration requirements while rapidly delivering a high-quality, value added, integrated system architecture and service-based implementation infrastructure. In particular, we show how the choice of an enterprise service bus as a deployment infrastructure helps discharge many of the obligations induced by the mentioned requirements - if it is combined with an agile, yet systematic approach for architecture discovery and design