Improving Application Decoupling in Virtual Enterprise Integration

Abstract

The interaction of applications belonging to several enterprise information systems (EIS), forming a collaborative network in a virtual enterprise (VE) context, raises an application integration problem that is even more stringent than within a single EIS, since a VE has a temporary nature and therefore integration requirements can change more frequently. Current integration technologies, such as web services and RESTful APIs, solve the interoperability problem but usually entail more coupling than required by the interacting applications. This is caused by sharing data schemas between applications, even if not all features of those schemas are actually exercised. The fundamental problem of application integration is therefore how to provide at most the minimum coupling possible while ensuring at least the minimum interoperability requirements. This chapter proposes compliance and conformance as the concepts to achieve this goal, by sharing only the subset of the features of the data schema that are actually used.