An ontology for interoperability assessment: a systemic approach

Gabriel S S Leal (1, 2) , Wided Guédria (1, 2) , Hervé Panetto (2)

1 LIST - Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology
2 CRAN - Centre de Recherche en Automatique de Nancy

Enterprise Interoperability is a requirement for ensuring an effective collaboration within a network of enterprises. Therefore, interoperability should be continuously assessed and improved for avoiding collaboration issues. To do so, an interoperability assessment can be performed by the concerned enterprises. Such an assessment provides an overview of the enterprise systems' strengths and weaknesses regarding interoperability. A plethora of assessment approaches are proposed in the literature. The majority of them focus on one single aspect of interoperability. In general, to have a holistic view of the assessed systems, i.e. consider different aspects, enterprises have to apply different approaches. However, the application of multiple approaches may cause redundancy and confusion when assessing the same system using different metrics and viewpoints. Therefore, this article is to propose an ontology for interoperability assessment. The main objective of such an ontology is to provide a sound description of all relevant concepts and relationships regarding an interoperability assessment. Inference rules are also provided for reasoning on interoperability problems. A case study based on a real enterprise in presented to evaluate the proposed ontology.

Mots clés: system engineering; Enterprise interoperability; interoperability assessment; ontology

Domaines: Ingénierie assistée par ordinateur

Gabriel S S Leal, Wided Guédria, Hervé Panetto. An ontology for interoperability assessment: a systemic approach. Journal of Industrial Information Integration, 2019, 16:100100, pp.1-13. ⟨10.1016/j.jii.2019.07.001⟩. ⟨hal-02237124⟩