Interaction between Heterogeneous Autonomous Systems: Principles and Practice

Today, many enterprises use information systems to support their activities but as a rule these systems are heterogeneous and incompatible. When enterprises need to cooperate with each other, they have to overcome this heterogeneity and establish interaction between their information systems. Based on a case study from international business development, this paper analyzes principles and conditions for creating interaction between autonomous systems. Furthermore, an approach to interaction between heterogeneous information systems in the case study is presented, which is based on a service-oriented architecture and Web services. In this context, a business process model describes how the distributed autonomous systems should be used by companies in different countries to support establishment of business relationships. These systems have different data models, and use different industrial classifications. Our main contribution to research in the field of interaction between autonomous systems are (1) a proposal for principles to be taken into account when federating autonomous systems and (2) an experience report when putting these principles into practice in the case study presented.