Hub-and-spoke Interoperability: an out of the skies approach for large-scale data interoperability

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores

Data Interoperability is a key challenge in large-scale heterogeneous environments. In here, interoperability via standards is not feasible or even possible; then, the classic approach, Point-to-Point (P2P) Interoperability, presents here two key problems: the trouble of non-modifiable systems that inhibit full possible interoperability and the excessive quantity of interoperability resources needed for establishing interoperability. A new approach is required for sustaining interoperability in those environments! Laterally thinking, commercial air transportation environments exhibit similar properties and problems to Data Interoperability environments and therefore face comparable difficulties. Outstanding approaches such as scissor-hub operations and the hub-andspoke paradigm have managed to address those challenges in commercial air transportation environments. Which, looking from data interoperability perspective, raises the idea of Mediated Interoperability and Interoperability Compositions. From there, a novel approach for data interoperability is proposed, the Hub-and-Spoke(H&S) Interoperability, as the hypothesis for addressing data interoperability in largescale environments. The H&S Interoperability approach fully solves the interoperability coverage problem and significantly reduces the number of resources needed for realising interoperability, thus outperforming P2P Interoperability. At the end, it is provided a technological realisation of the H&S approach, as the Plug’n’Interoperate solution, built upon plug-and-play principles applied to data interoperability.