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1
Integration of Distributed Enterprise
Applications: A Survey
Wu He, and Li Da Xu, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract— Many industrial enterprises acquire disparate
systems and applications over the years. The need to integrate
these different systems and applications is often prominent for
satisfying business requirements and needs. In an effort to help
researchers in industrial informatics understand the
state-of-the-art of the enterprise application integration, this
paper discusses the architectures and key technologies used for
integrating distributed enterprise applications, illustrates their
strengths and weaknesses, and identifies research trends and
opportunities in this increasingly important area.
Index
Terms—Distributed
Enterprise
Applications,
Middleware, Enterprise Application Integration, Web Services,
Service-oriented Architecture(SOA), Enterprise Service Bus,
Industrial
Informatics,
Enterprise
Systems,
Industrial
Information Integration Engineering, Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID), Internet of Things (IoT)
I. INTRODUCTION
A
distributed enterprise application is defined as an
application with software components residing on more
than one computer in a network [1]. Oftentimes the network is
heterogeneous and is composed of diverse computers, devices,
and operating systems. In industrial enterprise environments,
many industry systems typically consist of numerous
technologies, protocols, applications, and devices which are
distributed across a network [2], [3]. As the industry
environments
become
increasingly
distributed
and
heterogeneous across multiple organizational and geographical
boundaries in recent years, there are strong demands to integrate
distributed applications in order to increase enterprises'
competitiveness. Particularly, the integration of distributed
industrial applications has been of interest in the arena of
industrial information systems. For example, according to
IEC61499 (International Electrotechnical Commission’s
Function Block specification) [4], a distributed control system
Manuscript received December 24, 2011. Accepted for publication
February 22, 2012.
Copyright © 2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted.
However, permission to use this material for any other purposes must be
obtained from the IEEE by sending a request to pubs-permissions@ieee.org
Wu He is with Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA
(phone:757-683-5008; email:whe@odu.edu)
Li Da Xu is with the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy
of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China; Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA
23529, USA(email:lxu@odu.edu)
consists of a number of applications that may be distributed
among multiple devices. Oftentimes control processing
application resides in a device and output conversion
application resides in another device. Sometimes a function
of an application may be distributed to several devices and
requires the cooperation of different parts to work properly.
Additionally, the applications and devices may be developed or
provided by different vendors [3] with different programming
languages, formats and protocols. Significant integration efforts
are required to increase the interoperability and other
collaborative features of these applications and devices.
Over the past three decades, many enterprises have invested
heavily to integrate distributed enterprise applications due to
the continuous mergers and acquisitions, joint venture,
outsourcing, corporate restructuring, infrastructure upgrades,
adoption of mobile devices, smart embedded devices, and
wireless sensors. Enterprises that are able to integrate their
various enterprise applications have a distinct competitive
advantage such as strategic utilization of company data and
technology for greater efficiency and profit [5].
Distributed enterprise applications typically require their
distributed components to interact with one another through
certain remote communication mechanisms such as
message-passing, and remote-invocations [6] in networking
environments. However, distributed enterprise applications are
often unable to communicate with each other due to reasons
such as lack of interoperability, variable formats, different
protocols, and dissimilar standards of operations. As distributed
enterprise applications continue to grow in scale and
complexity, integrating distributed enterprise applications has
been a challenging task. For example, many industry enterprises
have trouble in integrating industry applications rapidly,
inexpensively, and seamlessly. Such applications include
computer-aided design system, engineering document
management system, manufacturing execution system, and
product data management system running on different hosts. For
many industry enterprises, it is imperative for these industry
systems to cooperate for achieving business enterprise
objectives. To address problems that concern integration, an IT
solution named Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) has
been developed to help achieve quality integration [5].
EAI encompasses technologies that enable distributed and
heterogeneous applications to interact to one another across the
network and help integrate many individual applications into a
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2
seamless whole [5]. It consists of plans, methods and tools
which aim to consolidate and coordinate computer applications.
EAI facilitates the integration of both intra-organizational and
inter-organizational systems. EAI solutions comprise the
efficient integration of diverse business processes and data
across the enterprises, interoperation and integration of
intra-organizational and inter-organizational enterprise
applications, conversion of varied data representations among
involving systems, and the connection of proprietary/legacy
data sources, ES, applications, processes, and workflows
interorganizationally[7]. Through creating an integrative
structure, EAI connects the heterogeneous data sources,
systems, and applications intra- or inter- enterprise. With EAI,
intra- or inter-enterprise application systems can be integrated
seamlessly, and can ensure that different divisions or even
enterprises can cooperate with each other [8].
EAI is highly relevant to industrial informatics as industrial
informatics concern the information flow and information
systems within the entire industrial organization [8]. EAI is a
key research area in Industrial Information Integration
Engineering (IIIE) which is a scientific sub-discipline in
engineering. Broadly speaking, IIIE is a set of foundational
concepts and techniques that facilitate the industrial information
integration process; specifically speaking, IIIE comprises
methods for solving complex problems when developing IT
infrastructure for industrial sectors, especially in the aspect of
information integration [8]. One of the main purposes for
establishing IIIE is to respond to the challenging demand from
industries. For instance, the International Electronics
Manufacturing Initiative (iNEMI) revealed in 1996 that existing
factory information and communication systems were hardly
interoperable and required huge integration efforts [9].
Specifically, they pointed out a technology gap in the domain of
middleware technologies required to integrate communicating
machines and factory information systems. Afterwards,
substantial efforts were spent to integrate disparate applications
and systems in industry sectors. Nowadays many industries such
as telecommunication, manufacturing, logistics, and electrical
power have implemented and integrated distributed enterprise
applications such as distributed control systems in factory
automation, e-manufacturing systems, and distributed
electronics production systems [3], [10-12]. For example, a
factory management system may include an order processing
application, a production scheduling application and a
production control application which reside in three separate
servers [13]. The three distributed applications then cooperate
with each other to achieve collaborative order management
function. The literature also shows that distributed enterprise
applications sometimes perform better or required less
resources than a large centralized software system for some
industrial applications such as manufacturing control software
and manufacturing execution systems due to the increased
demand for agility, flexibility and scalability, dispersed users in
various locations, and unanticipated system change [1], [11].
As the dialogue among researchers and practitioners in both
the industrial informatics and enterprise systems areas are
growing [8] [14], in an effort to provide IEEE Transactions on
Industrial Informatics readers an avenue to understand the state
of the art and future trends of enterprise application integration
in industries, this paper aims to review the past, present and
future development of enterprise application integration
architectures and technologies. The topics of interest to
industrial informatics readers include, but are not limited to,
distributed enterprise architectures, middleware technologies
for integrating distributed enterprise applications in industries,
and research trends and challenges involved in the integration of
distributed enterprise applications. However, the review is by
no means meant to be exhaustive. We hope this paper can help
readers become more aware of the challenges and opportunities
that exist in this increasingly important area and bring their
expertise to help address research challenges for integrating
various enterprise applications in industries.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2
presents a brief overview on the historical development of
distributed enterprise application architectures. Section 3
provides a brief overview on the past development on main
distributed application integration technologies. Recent
researches on enterprise application integration technologies
are presented in Section 4. Based on the review, future trends
and research challenges are discussed in Section 5. Conclusions
are drawn in Section 6.
II. HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT: DISTRIBUTED ENTERPRISE
APPLICATION ARCHITECTURES
Distributed enterprise application architectures have
undergone an extensive evolution. Early generation enterprise
applications were built on centralized mainframes. As the
capacity of personal computers increased, many applications
and tasks were moved to the user’s computers to better satisfy
the business or processing needs. As a result, first generation
distributed enterprise applications were developed based on a
two-tier client/server architecture in the 1980s [15]. In a two-tier
client/server architecture, the client is responsible for presenting
the application to the user while the server is in charge of data
management and storage [16]. As the complexity of transactions
and the amounts of data continue to increase, a 3-tier
architecture became popular in enterprise application
development in the mid-late 1990s. On a 3-tier architecture,
software components are divided into three layers: a
presentation layer, application layer, and database layer [14].
The client tier focuses on the user interface and interacts with
the middle tier via protocols such as DLL, API, or RPC. The
middle tier focuses on application logic and interacts with the
database tier via standard database protocols such as ODBC.
Middleware technologies such as CORBA are often deployed to
the middle tier to integrate distributed enterprise applications
including independently developed applications. In addition,
TP (transaction processing) monitors often run on the middle
tier for scalability, workload and resource balancing needs [14].
As Web applications become widespread, the 3-tier
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3
architecture was extended to the web-centric architecture by
adding web clients and web servers (e.g., Apache). In a
web-centric architecture, the web client sends HTTP requests to
the Web server for content. The Web server either returns the
content directly or passes it on to a specific application server.
The application server interacts with the back-end database and
sends responses back to the client[14]. Furthermore, the 3-tier
architecture can be extended to the multi-tier architecture. For
example, additional tiers are often introduced between client
and data layer for security, workload and resource balancing,
and performance monitoring, etc.
III. INTEGRATION OF DISTRIBUTED ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS:
THE PAST
Enterprise integration includes physical system integration,
application integration, and business integration [14]. This
paper mainly concerns the application integration on
heterogeneous platforms. The research community came up
with EAI solution to help achieve quality application
integration. Originally, EAI was only focused on integrating
intra-organizational applications, but now it has been expanded
to cover aspects of inter-organizational integration [7-8]. EAI
provides ways to integrate heterogeneous applications on
different platforms [8].
Integration can be studied through different dimensions
including
integration
scope
(intra-enterprise
and
inter-enterprise integration), integration point of view (user's
view, designer's view and programmer's view), integration layer
and integration level [14]. Furthermore, intra-enterprise
integration can be divided into horizontal and vertical
integration [13-14]. Inter-enterprise integration includes B2B
(business to business) or the B2C (business to customer)
integration [14]. Integration levels can be at hardware, platform,
syntactical, and semantic levels. From the technology
perspective, researchers found it useful to study the integration
in terms of layers [17] including communication layer, data
layer, business logic layer, and presentation layer. Below we
give a brief overview of main integration technologies based on
different layers.
A. Communication Layer Integration
Integrating distributed applications requires those separate
applications to be able to communicate with one another and to
exchange information. For example, an application may need to
know the status and operations of a remote application in order
to perform certain tasks such as scheduling. Typically a set of
protocols are needed to transport information between two
different applications. Examples of such protocols are HTTP
protocol and IIOP protocol in CORBA [17].
B. Data Integration
Research on data integration mainly deals with moving or
federating data between heterogeneous data sources which can
reside on different machines under different operating systems
and database management systems [14],[18]. Data integration
involves a lot of data conversion among elements including
source schema, mediated (target) schema, and the mapping
between them. Source schema refers to the data model of data
sources to be integrated; mediated schema is the view of the
integrated system from the existing data sources; the mapping
provides mechanisms for transforming queries and data from
the integrated systems to those of data sources [17],[19]. The
drawback of data integration is that it requires a significant
effort to understand the data models and to maintain the
mediated schema if there is any change with the source schema.
C. Business logic integration
Integration at this layer can be further divided into integration
in the sub-layers such as basic coordination, functional
interfaces, business protocol and policies, and non-functional
properties [17]. A traditional way for the application integration
involves low-level network and operating system programming,
making the resulting enterprise system difficult to maintain,
configure and upgrade. To make the application integration at
the business logic level easier, the research community mainly
focuses on the development of middleware technologies. A
number of middleware technologies have been developed to
build and integrate distributed enterprise applications [20] in the
past two decades. Middleware is designed to provide high-level
primitives and hide the lower-level primitives of the computing
machinery underneath it and thus make distributed systems
design much easier and faster [20-21]. By adopting the
abstractions that middleware provides, we can isolate
applications from the variety of ever-changing hardware
platforms, operating systems, networks, protocols, and
transports that make up the enterprise computing systems [2].
Due to the advantages brought by middleware, the literature has
witnessed an extensive use of middleware technologies in
industrial environments [3], [6], [13]. As an important
integration technology, middleware technologies are often used
by industrial enterprises to integrate new applications and
legacy applications[8]. Typically, a middleware for
communication
comprises
two
types
of
remote
communications: message-passing, and/or remote-invocation
[6]. More specifically, message-passing includes synchronous
and asynchronous messaging [21]; Remote-invocation includes
synchronous, client-side asynchronous, and server-side
asynchronous remote invocations [6]. Additionally, middleware
can provide functions to ensure reliability, scalability, and
performance to enterprise systems. Figure 1 illustrates the use of
middleware in distributed applications.
Fig. 1. The use of middleware in distributed applications
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There are many types of middleware such as RPC-based
middleware, message-oriented middleware, event-based
middleware, database middleware, transaction processing (TP)
monitors, security middleware, agent-based middleware and
service oriented middleware [14], [22-23]. In addition, some
companies such as SAP implement their own custom
middleware as part of their application solution. Each of these
technologies and approaches has their own advantages and
disadvantages. As custom middleware has limited system
portability, interoperability, and configurability, and can be
expensive in terms of development and maintenance [2], our
review mainly focus on general purpose middleware
technologies. Our review shows that the most commonly used
general purpose middleware technologies at the business logic
layer for integrating distributed enterprise applications include
the RPC-based (remote invocation) middleware (e.g., DCE,
DCOM, CORBA and Java RMI) and message-oriented
middleware (MOM). Below is a brief introduction to some of
the major middleware technologies.
1) Distributed Computing Environment (DCE)
DCE was developed by the Open System Foundation in early
1990's and was designed to support distributed applications in
heterogeneous hardware and software environments. DCE
consists of multiple components such as the Remote Procedure
Call (RPC), the Cell and Global Directory Services (CDS and
GDS), the Security Service, DCE Threads, Distributed Time
Service (DTS), and Distributed File Service (DFS). These
components were integrated to work closely together [24-25].
DCE is supported by many different platforms and old legacy
operating systems. A main advantage of DCE is that the DCE
RPC facility provides a way of communicating between
software modules running on different systems [14]. Compared
to traditional networking programming methods such as using
socket calls, RPC is relatively simpler to code. DCE supports
both portability and interoperability by providing the developer
with capabilities that hide differences among the various
hardware, software and networking elements an application will
deal with in a large network [24]. However, DCE does not have
strong support for object-oriented languages because RPC is
inherently procedural. As object-oriented languages such as
Java are widely used in industries and business applications,
DCE has lost its popularity in the marketplace [25].
2) Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM)
DCOM is a Microsoft technology for communication among
software components distributed across networked computers
[14]. DCOM is the distributed extension to COM, which
provides a set of interfaces allowing clients and servers to
communicate within the same computer [14]. Using DCOM,
two objects on two separate computers are able to call each
other's methods. DCOM actually builds an object remote
procedure call (ORPC) layer on top of DCE RPC to support
remote objects. DCOM supports object-oriented languages
such as C++ and Java. DCOM is well supported by Windows
system platforms. However, DCOM only supports a few
non-Windows operating systems, which limits the use of
DCOM for heterogeneous networks [25].
3) Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)
CORBA is an object-oriented middleware technology
defined by the Object Management Group in1993 in the early
1990’s. Different from DCOM, CORBA is platform and
language independent. CORBA provides support for a broad
range of platforms and programming languages and has ability
to integrate legacy software applications. The Object Request
Broker (ORB) is the core of the system. The Internet InterORB
Protocol (IIOP®) is used as the standard communication
protocol between ORB. An ORB delivers requests from client
applications to server applications. The CORBA specification
provides a uniform framework across the entire distributed
environment and makes applications built using an ORB very
portable across diverse platforms [14]. CORBA had
applications in many domains including telecommunications,
finance, medicine, and manufacturing [27]. However, CORBA
was complex and hard to use correctly, leading to long
development times and high defect rates. As implementing
CORBA-based distributed application is costly and technically
complex, the interest in CORBA has declined sharply [25].
Currently, CORBA has pretty much lost its position in the
marketplace. But some strengths of CORBA have been
incorporated into technologies such as J2EE and Web services.
4) Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI)
Java RMI was released by Sun around 1997 and java RMI
provides a distributed computing platform specifically focused
on Java-based clients and servers[28]. Java RMI enables the
programmer to create distributed Java technology-based to Java
technology-based applications, in which the methods of remote
Java objects can be invoked from other Java virtual machines,
possibly on different hosts [14], [28]. Due to Java’s inherent
platform-independent capabilities, RMI-based applications are
capable of running on a wide variety of computing platforms.
However, RMI heavily relies on Java and does not have direct
support for other common languages such as C or C++.
5) Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
MOM relies on messages to enable communication between
separate systems. MOM uses the passing and queuing of
messages, as well as multiprotocol support, to carry information
and action requests between heterogeneous distributed
applications or between distributed components within an
application [6], [17]. MOM enhances flexibility by allowing
applications to switch messages without the requirement of
knowing on which platform or processor the other application
located. MOM is inherently a loosely coupled, asynchronous
technology [14]. MOM facilitates communications across a
range of messaging systems, such as request-response,
prolonged conversation, application queues, publishing and
subscribing messaging, and broadcasting. MOM provides
strong support for asynchronous communications[6]. Main
disadvantages of MOM include limited scalability and
heterogeneity support, lack of standards and poor portability
[18]. MOM has been used successfully in some industrial
systems such as integrated manufacturing systems [12], [17].
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5
D. Presentation Layer Integration
The integration in the presentation layer focuses on the user
interface(UI) integration. Presenting integrated and dynamic
view for users is the main goal of UI integration [29]. The UI
integration often builds applications by integrating components
at the graphical user interface. Although there is a large body of
research for integrations at the data layer or business logic layer,
the research community has done little work at the presentation
level [19]. A recent example of user interface integration is Web
mashup such as integrating Google Map with other applications.
Portlet is another technology in the UI integration and can help
produce customizable portal applications [29]. Further work on
effective standardization at the presentation level is needed for
effective user interface integration to take off [19].
IV. RECENT RESEARCH ON THE TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION OF
DISTRIBUTED ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS
In this section, we give a brief overview of recent research on
the integration of distributed enterprise applications
technologies including J2EE, .Net and Web services, Service
Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Service Bus.
A. J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition)
J2EE has emerged as a leading platform for developing
enterprise applications [30]. J2EE contains technologies such
as Java Database Connectivity, Enterprise Java Beans, Java
Naming and Directory Interface, Remote Method Invocation,
Java Server Pages (JSP), XML, etc. Particularly, the Enterprise
JavaBeans (EJB) provides a simplified method to develop
component-based distributed applications over heterogeneous
environments [14],[17]. J2EE has been used extensively in
industrial systems. For example, J2EE was used as a system
framework to integrate supply chain alliance enterprises’
information systems [31].
B. Microsoft’s .Net Framework
The .Net Framework standardizes how the languages refer to
data and objects and allows objects from different languages to
operate together. It allows the developers to develop the
application in different languages and allows the execution on
different types of runtime system and environment [26].
Basically, the .Net programming languages all compile to a
common machine language, Microsoft Intermediate Language
(MSIL), which runs on .NET Framework. The MSIL is then
converted into machine code during the application execution.
The .NET framework also provides remoting infrastructure
which allows an object on one computer to call the methods of
an object on another computer[32]. Using .NET remoting,
objects can communicate with one another even though they
reside on different computers. Many developers use remoting
for implementing distributed applications within the intranet. As
.Net runs only on Windows systems, .Net technology has
limited reach in heterogeneous environments.
C. Web Services, Service-oriented architecture and
Enterprise Service Bus
As traditional middleware such as CORBA and DCOM are
typically used for intranet applications and in many cases they
may not be able to cross firewall boundaries, web services have
been developed to support the integration of internet
applications in recent years. A Web service has a collection of
functions that are packaged as a single entity and can be
published to the network for use by other programs. Web
services can be accessed by any language and can run on any
operating system. They utilize the HTTP protocol as the
underlying transport, which allows function requests to pass
through firewalls. XML is used to format the input and output
parameters of the request, so the request is not tied to any
particular component technology or object calling convention.
Main web services protocols includes SOAP (the protocol to
interact with a Web Service), WSDL (the language for
specifying the interface to a Web Service), and UDDI (the
repository for storing references to Web Services so that clients
can find them) [14], [33].
Web services are building blocks for constructing Web-based
distributed applications and can be viewed as a middleware that
is more suitable to be used across the Internet. In essence, Web
services are built around the concept of messaging and
frequently
these
messages
take
the
form
of
request/response-type remote procedure calls on remote objects
[34]. Both J2EE and .Net can be used to create web services.
Web services consist of three components: a service broker that
acts as a look up service between a service provider and a
service requestor; a service provider that publishes its services
to the service broker; a service requester that asks the service
broker where to find a suitable service provider and that binds
itself to the provider [33].
Web services play an important role for integrating different
middleware systems. Web services can provide “middleware for
middleware” abstraction layer for modern integration
applications[2]. As different middleware has different
advantages, many enterprises used various middleware for their
application integration over the years. As a result, these
enterprises face “Middleware Islands” issue caused by multiple
middleware approaches because middleware technologies and
products from different vendors don’t interoperate easily [35].
As a result, enterprises have to find ways to integrate these
different middleware systems. In some cases, ad-hoc techniques
such as adapters can be used to extend one of the enterprise
middleware systems to wrap or integrate the others. But in many
cases, this isn’t possible due to reasons such as lack of technical
expertise and costs [2]. Web Services and its underlying
principle named Service-oriented architecture are considered
good solutions for such middleware-to-middleware
interworking [2],[35].
SOA represents the latest trend in integrating heterogeneous
systems and different middleware systems. SOA provides
guidelines on how services are described, discovered and used
[8], [14]. In SOA, software applications are packaged as
services. Each service has a well-defined interface which lists
the operations it provides and the set of messages it accepts and
sends in response [35]. Services can be reconstructed and
reused to create new applications[8]. In industrial systems, SOA
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6
has been successfully applied to supply chain management
systems, manufacturing execution system, train car management
system, control system for the semiconductor processing
equipment, healthcare medical system, electronic power
application system, electronics production systems, etc. [8],
[12], [36-37]. For example, a factory’s online business system
can have a purchase-and-ordering application which could
communicate to an inventory application on another web server
that specifies the items that need to be reordered or a Web
service from a credit bureau which requests the credit history
from the loan services for prospective borrowers [38].
Service-oriented integration is an evolution of EAI in which
proprietary connections are replaced with standards-based
connections over an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) notion that is
location transparent and provides a flexible set of routing,
mediation, monitoring, and transformation capabilities. ESB is
able to work across different middleware products and
standards to implement enterprise-wide SOA [2], [8]. ESB and
open protocol SOAP can shield from different proprietary
protocols (CORBA IIOP, J2EE RMI, etc.) of various types of
heterogeneous system to realize the smooth flow of data
between application systems and improve interoperability
capacity between systems [39]. Thus, SOA-based ESB is often
viewed as a new middleware technology. An example is that an
electronic power application system was integrated by using
ESB in Northern China [39]. Figure 2 illustrates an
SOA-oriented integration environment using ESB. In summary,
Web services, SOA and ESB provide a promising framework
for inter-enterprise integration.
Fig. 2. An SOA-oriented integration environment using ESB.
V. FUTURE PERSPECTIVES
A. Trends
Integrating of various industry applications are an ongoing
task for industry enterprises that are adopting new technologies
and embedded devices. Some new trends in this area include:
1) As web services, SOA and ESA are being increasingly
applied to complex integration tasks that involve both existing
and legacy applications, there is an increased need to ensure
Quality of Service (QoS) in the integration process [40]. As
different web service applications often have different QoS
requirements and may cause conflicts between each other for
resources such as bandwidth and processing time, it is necessary
to develop empirically tested QoS integration models to
measure and monitor the QoS parameters, checks the
agreed-upon service levels, reports violations to the authorized
parties and implement dynamic selection mechanism for
QoS-aware web services [41-42]. We expect to see models like
Trusted and Autonomic Service Cooperation model to be
deployed in industrial enterprises. In addition, services in
service-oriented industry applications will be increasingly
integrated using different multi-tenancy patterns [43].
2) As the size and complexity of industrial applications
continue to grow, the amount of data increase exponentially.
There is an increasing need to integrate OLAP (Online
Analytical Processing), knowledge discovery, data mining
functions and data sources for decision support, information
integration
and
other
business
needs
[44-46].
Application-specific middleware such as data mining
middleware will be increasingly developed and deployed for
industrial information system integration.
3) The semantic web and social networking technologies are
still in their infancy regarding industrial applications[47-48].
The integration of semantic web and social networking
technologies with sensor data is expected to grow in industrial
applications [49] and add more values to customers and partners
[47] in industrial settings. Various ontology approaches for
semantic integration and interoperability [14] will become
mature and more applicable in industrial environments.
4) Mobile applications, embedded systems and smart
embedded devices have been increasingly deployed in industry
enterprises. Advances in semiconductor and transmission
technology have added many advanced functionalities into
interconnected and self-reliant smart embedded devices such as
sensors and actuators. This creates new opportunities and
challenges to build communication and interoperability
between industrial systems and embedded devices. Due to its
strong support for both autonomy and interoperability, SOA
approaches have the capabilities to implement communication
and data exchange between embedded devices and applications
[50]. We expect to see that industry applications are
increasingly integrated with services running on large numbers
of networked, resource-limited mobile and smart embedded
devices using SOA approaches. On the other hand, techniques
such as embedded Web servers[51], gateway implementation
and XML[52-53] and TCP/IP –based protocol application
programming[51-52] will continue to be used to exchange data
with large number of heterogeneous Networked Control
Systems (NCS) and commercial Programmable Logic
Controllers (PLC) deployed in the industry over the years. A
main reason is that SOA has not been adopted yet in these NCS
and PLCs and thus cannot be considered as a feasible solution
for integration with already deployed control systems [51].
B. Some Research Challenges
1) As more and more industrial enterprise are adopting Web
services to integrate various applications and devices, security
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7
challenges become more prominent. For example, security risk
may arise in the processes of command transferring, remote
diagnosis, and maintenance [3] because information exchange
and device access have to cross multiple corporate networks and
the Internet now.
2) Many industrial enterprises have distributed real-time
control systems (DRCS) which communicate with sensors and
actuators over a communication network [53]. Generally,
DRCS needs more reliability, robustness and efficiency than
data-centric applications. Particularly, industrial enterprises
such as power plants have strict performance constraints and
response time requirements on their industrial systems and
applications. For example, many industrial automation and
control systems collect data from heterogeneous sensors and
require real-time analyses for the data collected from a large
variety of heterogeneous sensors [54-57]. As DRCS is playing
an increasingly crucial role in critical industrial operations and
transactions, new integration techniques such as real-time
distribution middleware, distributed real-time Java [6] and
real-time SOA solutions [54-55] are needed to address
performance and time constraints concerns, predict
performance, and mitigate integration risks such as lost or
missent data, incomplete, unreadable, or invalid data,
accountability and security [58-59].
3) In practice, the integration of enterprise applications and
devices may collapse due to various unfavorable factors and
unanticipated changes. Thus, research on the integration
reliability including data and information reliability is highly
valued by all industrial enterprises [54]. New guidelines and
methods such as task load balance, fault-tolerant and message
scheduling and transaction mechanisms needed to be further
developed to ensure the reliability, maintainability, fast
diagnosing and robustness of integrated industrial applications
and devices in various environments.
4) As new technologies and devices are constantly introduced
into industrial systems, user interface integration for industrial
systems poses many new problems[19] like various interface
types, definitions, and service interfaces(functional, discovery,
binding, etc.) [60]. Interface integration requires a good
understanding of various applications, devices and
enterprise-wide integration requirements. Currently, there is a
lack of conceptual modeling techniques that can effectively
elicit, represent, and analyze enterprise-wide integration
requirements [61].
5) In recent years, new technologies such as wireless sensor
networks(WSN), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and
Internet of Things (IoT) have been deployed to industrial
systems such as logistics systems, material flow systems, and
supply chain management systems [62-63]. These new
technologies made the integration of industrial applications,
devices and various interfaces more difficult. There is a lack of
services, guidelines and standard architecture for allowing
interactions of heterogeneous devices, sensors, aggregators,
actuators and diverse domain of context aware applications
while preserving reusability, security and privacy [64]. For
example, the lack of services for connecting users to the
appropriate sensor networks becomes very apparent as the
amount of sensor network data sources increases [65].
Deployment of built-in and dynamically deployed user services
in a physical device still need further research work to ensure
the expected functionality and performance [66]. Various
middleware
solutions
and
architectures
(e.g.,
publisher/subscriber architecture, real-time message bus
architecture, ontology architecture) for integrating industrial
applications, RFID, WSN and IoT have been proposed [14],
[50, 54], [65-73]. However, these solutions and architectures
are typically designed for respective domains. The development
of an ontology precisely defining concepts and properties of an
enterprise architecture domain integrating these new
technologies is considered challenging [74]. The scalability and
customization of these middleware solutions and architectures
are still open issues and need further research.
VI. CONCLUSION
Enterprise
application
integration
concerns
the
interoperability of applications on heterogeneous platforms as
well as access to shared data and services by various distributed
applications [14], [75-76]. Over the past three decades, a
number of technologies and techniques have been developed to
address the integration issue of distributed enterprise
applications in networked environments. In this paper, we have
surveyed the state-of-the-art of the integration of distributed
enterprise applications, covering its essential concepts,
architectures, key technologies for application integration as
well as research directions. As enterprises spread their
boundaries across different business areas and acquire disparate
technology solutions and applications, integrating distributed
enterprise applications becomes inevitable for enterprises that
need to achieve business competitiveness. It is noted that there
are strong demands in industry to add interoperability and other
collaborative features to existing industrial information systems
[3], [14], [74]. As more and more industry enterprises are
adopting multi-tier client/server, Internet and service-oriented
architectures for their enterprise applications and industrial
devices [12], [27], [77-81], the need for interoperability is
prominent in the industrial enterprise environment [13].
Currently, there are still many research challenges such as user
interface integration, reliability, performance management and
security risk management [3], data mining for distributed
applications[82], cross infrastructures services access
protection and relative services orchestration [83], integration
framework for supply chain applications[84-85], integration of
hybrid wireless networks in enterprise systems[86], architecture
design for real-time sensor network [65], control architecture
for the sensor, actuator and control service implementation [60]
that need to be resolved in order for industrial systems to
become more applicable [8]. Additionally, we believe that the
dialogue in both the industrial informatics and enterprise
systems areas needs to be enhanced in order to result in new
development of integrated industry enterprise systems.
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8
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Wu He received the B.S. degree in computer
science from DongHua University, China, in
1998, and the Ph.D. degree in information
science from the University of Missouri, USA,
in 2006. His research interests include
Enterprise Applications, and Knowledge Management.
Li Da Xu (M’86-SM’11) received the M.S.
degree in information science and engineering
from the University of Science and Technology
of China, in 1981, and the Ph.D. degree in
systems science and engineering from Portland
State University, Portland, USA, in 1986. He
serves as the Founding Chair of IFIP TC8
WG8.9 and the Founding Chair of the IEEE SMC Society
Technical Committee on Enterprise Information Systems.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors appreciate the valuable comments from the Editor
and three anonymous reviewers. This project was partially
supported by the NSFC (National Natural Science Foundation
of China) Grant 71132008, Changjiang Scholar Program of the
Ministry of Education of China, and the US National Science
Foundation Grant 1044845.
Copyright (c) 2011 IEEE. Personal use is permitted. For any other purposes, permission must be obtained from the IEEE by emailing pubs-permissions@ieee.org.