The role of service oriented architectures in systems engineering

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Andary, James F. | Sage, Andrew P.

Affiliations: Department of Systems Engineering and Operations Research, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: Notions of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) have recently become popular and potentially very useful in the management, business and engineering worlds as the enterprise-focused Information Technology (IT) architecture of choice. SOA is an approach to defining integration-architectures based on the concept of services, where a service is defined as a mechanism that enables access to one or more capabilities using a prescribed interface. A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a way of organizing services and associated hardware and software so that it is potentially possible to respond quickly to the changing requirements of the marketplace. Recognizing the significant advantages of service oriented architecture applied to a business enterprise, we ask: Can an engineering organization, specifically a systems engineering organization, realize similar benefits? This paper will attempt to answer that question by exploring the possibility and advantages of applying SOA to the systems engineering design process, specifically as a key enabler of the Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) paradigm.

DOI: 10.3233/IKS-2010-0159

Journal: Information Knowledge Systems Management, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 47-74, 2010