Interoperability Mismatch Challenges in Heterogeneous SOA-based Systems

In Industry 4.0, systems with a heterogeneous implementation, different architecture, protocols, and semantics have to be integrated into collaborative environments. The interoperability between them has become a major challenge in this new ecosystem of the industry, thereby generating several research questions about how to manage the information exchange and collaboration between systems with so vastly different properties.This paper presents a detailed investigation of the different mismatch problems that can happen in the information exchange in heterogeneous SOA-based environments where the interoperability is crucial. The proposed solution in this paper is an Adapter System that can aid generatation of new service consumer interfaces at both compile-time and run-time. The interfaces are based on Service Contracts, thereby allowing heterogeneous systems to communicate and interchange services.The proposed approach requires a new point of view in the service description field that can provide a holistic description of the information required for creating both run-time and compile-time consumer interfaces.