Integration of Systems in Ultra-Large-Scale Systems Using a Data-Centric Rich Services Approach

An Ultra-Large-Scale (ULS) system is generally considered as a system-of-systems that have many crosscutting concerns. As the size of a system-of-systems grows, and interoperability demands between the sub-systems are increased, achieving more scalable and dynamic integration of sub-systems becomes a major challenge. In this integration, each sub-system has its own domain that may have independent policies. Over the last few years, the notion of Rich Services has emerged as a technique for facilitating integration of systems. In this paper, a Data-Centric Rich Services (DCRS) approach is proposed to improve the dynamicity, scalability, and security of Rich Services in a ULS system. In the proposed approach, a two-layer and data-centric middleware is presented to manage orchestration of Rich Services. The lower layer is a Data Distribution Service (DDS) middleware used for data-centric, publish-subscribe, real-time, and loosely-coupled communication among Rich Services. The upper layer is used for dynamic and secure configuration and reconfiguration of Rich Services. We also analyze the performance of our approach using simulation-based experiments.