A Rich Services Approach to CoCoME

Systems-of-systems integration projects present exquisite challenges for software and systems engineering researchers and practitioners. Traditional integration approaches involve time-consuming rework bearing major financial and technical risk. Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) have emerged as a widely accepted solution to this challenge because they use standards-based infrastructure to forge large-scale systems out of loosely-coupled, interoperable services. SOAs can create systems-of-systems by mapping existing systems into services, then orchestrating communication between the services. New functionality can be created by either adding new services or modifying communication among existing services. Because of these features, SOA projects are particularly amenable to agile development processes. Consequently, well executed SOAs can drive down financial and technical risk by improving flexibility and reducing time to market.