Enterprise interoperability assessment: a requirements engineering approach

One of the main challenges within collaborative business ecosystems are the management of Interoperability. Indeed, Interoperability is a crucial prerequisite that must be satisfied when enterprises need to work together for seizing new business opportunities and improving competitiveness. To develop and improve enterprise systems interoperability, a set of interoperability requirements needs to be verified. Indeed, knowing the different requirements and their relationships are paramount for identifying potential impacts on the overall system. Many research works have been proposed in the literature for defining and analysing such requirements. However, existing work do not explicitly specify the interdependencies between interoperability requirements. The objective of this article is, therefore, to investigate and define the interoperability requirements and their interdependencies. This will provide a holistic and clear view of the relations between the system components and their associated requirements. Therefore, one will be able to identify potential causes of the non-fulfilment of requirements, and their impacts on the concerned system. To do so, a Requirements Engineering approach is used to identify and formalise interoperability requirements and their relationships.