Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
1, FEBRUARY 2014 35
Abstract—Many industrial enterprises acquire disparate sys- device. Sometimes a function of an application may be dis-
tems and applications over the years. The need to integrate these tributed to several devices and requires the cooperation of dif-
different systems and applications is often prominent for satisfying ferent parts to work properly. Additionally, the applications and
business requirements and needs. In an effort to help researchers
in industrial informatics understand the state-of-the-art of the
devices may be developed or provided by different vendors [3]
enterprise application integration, we examined the architectures with different programming languages, formats, and protocols.
and technologies for integrating distributed enterprise applica- Significant integration efforts are required to enhance and in-
tions, illustrated their strengths and weaknesses, and identified crease the interoperability of these applications and devices.
research trends and opportunities in this increasingly important So far, many enterprises have invested heavily to inte-
area. grate distributed enterprise applications due to the continuous
Index Terms—Distributed enterprise applications, enterprise mergers and acquisitions, joint venture, outsourcing, corporate
application integration, enterprise service bus, industrial infor- restructuring, infrastructure upgrades, adoption of mobile
matics, industrial information integration engineering, Internet devices, embedded devices, and wireless sensors. Integrating
of things (IoT), middleware, enterprise systems, radio frequency
identification (RFID). various applications owned by the enterprise can enhance or
increase the enterprise’s competitive advantages [5].
Distributed enterprise applications typically require their
I. INTRODUCTION distributed components to interact with one another through
certain remote communication mechanisms such as mes-
Initiative (iNEMI) revealed that many industry systems did not and a database management and processing layer [22]. Middle-
cooperate with each other [17]. Afterwards, substantial efforts ware such as CORBA are often deployed to the middle tier to
were made to integrate disparate applications and systems in integrate distributed enterprise applications including indepen-
industry sectors. Nowadays many industries such as telecom- dently developed applications [22], [23]. In addition, transaction
munication, manufacturing, logistics, and energy have imple- processing (TP) monitors often run on the middle tier for scala-
mented and integrated distributed enterprise applications such bility, workload, and resource balancing needs [22].
as distributed control systems in factory automation, e-manufac- As Web applications become widespread, the three-tier archi-
turing systems, and distributed electronics production systems tecture was extended by adding web clients (mainly browsers)
[3], [18]–[20]. For example, a factory management system may and web servers (e.g., Apache) [14]. Furthermore, the three-tier
include an order processing application, a production sched- architecture continues to evolve and subsequently the multi-
uling application and a production control application which re- tier architecture appears. For example, additional tiers are often
side in three separate servers [21]. The three distributed appli- introduced between client and other layers such as data layer
cations then cooperate with each other to achieve their planned for security, workload and resource balancing, and performance
business purpose. The literature also shows that distributed en- monitoring [22], [23].
terprise applications sometimes perform better or required less
resources than a large centralized software system [19] for some III. INTEGRATION OF DISTRIBUTED ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS:
industrial applications such as manufacturing control software THE PAST
and manufacturing execution systems due to the increased de-
This paper mainly concerns application integration on het-
mand for agility, flexibility and scalability, dispersed users in
erogeneous platforms. The research community came up with
various locations, and unanticipated system change [1], [19].
the EAI solution to help achieve quality application integration.
In an effort to help readers understand the current status and
EAI provides ways to integrate heterogeneous applications on
future trends of integrating enterprise application in industries,
different systems and platforms [8].
we reviewed the past, present and future development related to
Integration can be studied through different dimensions in-
the enterprise architectures and enabling technologies for inte-
grating distributed enterprise applications. The main topics of cluding integration scope, integration point of view (views from
interest to industrial informatics readers include distributed en- users, designers and developers), integration layer and integra-
terprise architectures, middleware technologies for integrating tion level [22]. Furthermore, intra-enterprise integration can be
distributed enterprise applications in industries, and research divided into horizontal and vertical integration [21], [22]. Inter-
trends and challenges involved in the integration of distributed enterprise integration includes business to business and busi-
enterprise applications. We hope this paper can help readers be- ness to customer integration [22]. Integration levels can be at
come more aware of the challenges and opportunities that exist hardware, platform, syntactical, and semantic levels [22]. From
in this increasingly important area and bring their expertise to the technology perspective, many researchers found it useful to
help address research challenges for integrating various enter- examine the system integration by focusing on different layers
prise applications in industries. [25]. Below is a brief introduction to integration on different
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II layers.
provides an introduction to the historical development of
A. Communication Layer Integration
distributed enterprise application architectures. Section III
provides a brief overview about the major distributed appli- Integrating distributed applications requires those separate
cation integration technologies developed in the past decades. applications to be able to communicate with each other and
Recent research work and progress on enterprise application to exchange data and information. For example, an application
integration technologies are presented in Section IV. Future may need to know the current status and operations of a remote
trends and research challenges are presented and discussed in application in order to perform certain tasks such as scheduling.
Section V. Conclusions are given in Section VI. Typically, protocols such as HTTP and IIOP are used to facili-
tate information exchange among different applications [25].
II. HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT: DISTRIBUTED ENTERPRISE
APPLICATION ARCHITECTURES B. Data Integration
Distributed enterprise application architectures have under- Research on data integration mainly deals with moving or
gone an extensive evolution. Early generation enterprise ap- federating data between different types of data sources [22],
plications were built on centralized mainframes [22], [23]. As [26]. Data integration involves a lot of data mapping and con-
the capacity of personal computers increased, many applica- version among different elements including data source schema,
tions and tasks were moved to the user’s computers to better targeted data schema, and the mapping relationship between
satisfy the business or processing needs. As a result, first-gen- data source schema and targeted data schema [25], [27]. The
eration distributed enterprise applications were mainly devel- drawback of data integration is that developers will have to un-
oped using a simple two-tier client/server networked infrastruc- derstand and maintain the underlying schemas regularly to ad-
ture [23], [24]. As the amounts of data continue to increase, a dress any changes [27].
three-tier architecture became popular in enterprise application
development in the mid-late 1990s [22]. On a three-tier architec- C. Business Logic Integration
ture, software components are divided into three layers: a user Integration at this layer includes integration in the sublayers
interface layer, an application processing layer (middle tier), such as basic coordination, functional interfaces, business
HE AND XU: INTEGRATION OF DISTRIBUTED ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS: A SURVEY 37
for asynchronous communications [6]. Main disadvantages of of Internet applications in recent years [42]. A Web service usu-
MOM include limited support mechanisms for scalability, lack ally contains various functions that can be organized as a single
of industrial standards, and poor portability [26]. MOM has entity and can be published to the Web as a new service [41],
been used successfully in some industrial systems such as in- [42]. Web services use the HTTP protocol transport informa-
tegrated manufacturing systems [20], [25]. tion and thus can easily pass requests through firewalls [22],
[41], [42].
D. Presentation Layer Integration Web services are building blocks for constructing Web-based
The integration in the presentation layer mainly focuses on distributed applications and they are being considered by many
the user interface (UI) integration [27]. Presenting integrated researchers as a suitable middleware for Internet-related appli-
and consistent view for users is the main goal of UI integra- cation integration [41], [42]. Both J2EE and .Net can be used as
tion [37]. So far, the research community has not done enough programming tools by developers to create web services. Web
work at the presentation level [27]. A recent example of user services play an important role for integrating different middle-
interface integration is Web mashup such as integrating Google ware systems [41], [42]. As different middleware has different
Map with other applications [37]. Portlet is another UI integra- advantages, many enterprises have used various middleware
tion technology and has the technical potential to help produce over the years. However, middleware technologies and products
more customizable and flexible portal applications [37]. Further from different vendors often have trouble to easily interoperate
work on effective standardization and instructional design at the [43]. As a result, enterprises have to find other ways to integrate
presentation level is needed for effective user interface integra- these different middleware systems. In some cases, ad-hoc tech-
tion to take place [27]. niques such as adapters were used or developed to support the
integration needed by enterprises [2], [43]. But oftentimes, the
integration is hard due to its complexity, lack of technical ex-
IV. RECENT RESEARCH ON THE TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION
pertise and costs [2]. Web Services and its underlying principle
OF DISTRIBUTED ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS
named Service-oriented architecture are considered good solu-
In this section, we give a brief introduction to recent research tions for such middleware-to-middleware interaction [2], [43].
work on the integration of distributed enterprise applications SOA is a recent trend in integrating heterogeneous systems
technologies. Both perspectives from developers and users are and different middleware systems [43]. SOA provides detailed
examined respectively. From the developers’ perspective, en- guidelines and specifications to explain how services can be
abling technologies for system developments including J2EE, described, discovered and/or used [8], [22]. In SOA, devel-
.Net framework, and other web-based technologies are dis- opers organize and package different software applications as
cussed; from the users’ perspective, integration-related studies services. Each service includes an interface which specifies
based on grid computing and cloud computing are introduced. the operations available and types of messages it can handle
[8], [43]. In industrial systems, SOA has been widely adopted
A. Enabling Technologies for System Development and applied to transportation systems, manufacturing execution
1) Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE): J2EE has emerged as system, healthcare medical system, electronic power applica-
a leading platform for developing enterprise applications [38]. tion system, electronics production systems, factory ordering
J2EE contains a number of technologies such as “Enterprise systems, etc., [8], [20], [44]–[46].
Java Beans, RMI, Java Server Pages (JSP), and XML” [38]. Service-oriented integration depends on Enterprise Service
Particularly, the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) provides a sim- Bus (ESB). ESB is able to work across different middleware
plified method to develop component-based distributed appli- products and standards to implement enterprise-wide SOA [2],
cations over heterogeneous environments [22], [25]. J2EE has [8]. ESB can shield from different protocols (e.g., CORBA
been used extensively in industrial systems. For example, J2EE IIOP, J2EE RMI) [2] to implement the smooth data flow and
was used as a system framework to integrate supply chain al- exchange among different application systems [47]. Thus,
liance enterprises’ information systems [39]. SOA-based ESB is often viewed as a new middleware tech-
2) Microsoft’s .Net Framework: The .Net Framework pro- nology by many researchers and practitioners. An example
vides support for objects developed by different Microsoft pro- is that an electronic power application system was integrated
gramming technologies to communicate with each other [34]. It by using ESB in Northern China [47]. Fig. 2 illustrates an
allows programmers to create programs in different languages SOA-oriented integration environment using ESB. In sum-
and allows their execution on different runtime systems and en- mary, Web services, SOA and ESB provide a promising and
vironments [34]. The .NET framework also provides a way for valuable framework for inter-enterprise integration.
an object on one computer to call objects on a different com-
puter using remoting infrastructure [40]. As .Net runs only on B. Users’ Integrated Solutions
Windows systems, .Net technology has been rarely used in het- The selection of a solution to integrate specific distributed
erogeneous environments [34], [40]. enterprise applications depends on many factors such as the
3) Web Services, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and variety of resources and the complexity of businesses. Ade-
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB): As traditional middleware such quate computing solutions should be considered to support the
as CORBA and DCOM are typically used for Intranet appli- system-level integration of distributed applications. In this sec-
cations and often has trouble to cross firewall boundaries [22], tion, we briefly discuss two key integration solutions from the
[42], web services have been created to support the integration users’ perspective: grid computing and cloud computing.
HE AND XU: INTEGRATION OF DISTRIBUTED ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS: A SURVEY 39
automation and control systems collect data from hetero- VI. CONCLUSION
geneous sensors and require real-time analyses for the
EAI is concerned with the interaction and communication
data collected from a variety of heterogeneous sensors
of various applications on heterogeneous environments [22].
[66]–[69]. As DRCS is playing an increasingly crucial
So far, many techniques have been developed to integrate dis-
role in critical industrial operations and transactions, new
tributed enterprise applications. In this paper, we have surveyed
integration techniques such as real-time distribution mid-
the current status of the integration of distributed enterprise ap-
dleware, distributed real-time Java [6] and real-time SOA
plications and discussed the research directions. As enterprises
solutions [66], [67] are needed to address performance
continue to add and/or deploy more applications, integrating
concerns, and mitigate integration risks such as data
distributed enterprise applications becomes inevitable for enter-
quality issues, accountability, and security issues [70].
prises that need to achieve competitive advantages. As industry
3) In practice, the integration of enterprise applications and
enterprises are increasingly adopting multitier client/server, In-
devices may collapse due to various unanticipated changes
ternet and service-oriented architectures for their enterprise ap-
[70]. Thus, research on the integration reliability including
plications and industrial devices [20], [35], [85], we have to ad-
data and information reliability is highly valued by all in-
dress the need and requirement for interoperability in the in-
dustrial enterprises [66]. New guidelines and methods such
dustrial enterprise environment [21]. Currently, there are still
as task load balance, fault-tolerant and message scheduling
many research challenges such as user interface integration, re-
and transaction mechanisms needed to be further devel-
liability, performance management and security risk manage-
oped to ensure the reliability, robustness, maintainability,
ment [3], data mining for distributed applications [86], [87],
and rapid diagnosing of integrated industrial applications
architecture design and optimization for wireless, RFID, and
and devices in various environments.
real-time sensor network [75], [88], and control architecture for
4) As new technologies and devices are constantly introduced
the sensor, actuator and control service implementation [71].
into industrial systems, user interface integration for indus-
These challenges will have to be effectively addressed or over-
trial systems poses many new problems [27] like various
come in order for industrial systems to become more effective
interface types, standards, definitions, and service inter-
[8].
faces (functional, discovery, binding, etc.) [71]. Interface
integration requires a good understanding of various ap-
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Mar./Apr. 2010. mation Systems.