PhD position

Ph.D. thesis (CIFRE)

Berger Levrault and DISP Lab, Lyon, France

Title:  Ensuring Interoperability for "smart" information systems

Enterprise: Berger Levrault

Research Laboratory: DISP Lab

Where: Lyon, France

Recruitment date: As soon as possible

Application deadline: As soon as possible

Function: 3 years PhD candidate position in Berger Levrault (CDI). The position will be part time between Berger Levrault and DISP Lab.

Research topic : data interoperability, application exchange protocols, service-oriented architecture, event architecture, semantics, monitoring.

Context:

The need for sharing, exchanging and promoting information from information systems is constantly increasing and now represents a major concern in the various reforms of the local public sector (consolidation of local authorities, implementation of in place in 2016 Hospital Group Territory, Digital Republic). It is therefore essential to design "platforms" capable of providing answers to the rationalisation and simplification of data exchanges between software applications and with the outside world to promote and simplify the application of all these reforms.

In addition, service-oriented architectures and event architectures (SOA, EDA) are mature and widely used. At Berger-Levrault, their implementation ensures the scalability and maintainability of solutions. These architectures are characterised by the flexibility and the loose coupling of the subsystems that compose them (ie services, applications, IS ...) and rely on several means (Hohpe & Woolf, 2004) to route the data within this network of systems communicating. At this stage of maturity, we observe that these data exchanges are operational and meet the requirements of interoperability between heterogeneous systems (Leal, 2019).

Nevertheless, the number of standards recognised and used by the French public sector, the privileged sector of Berger-Levrault, increases the level of interconnection difficulties (Kurniawan & Ashari, 2015) of the different solutions developed by Berger-Levrault. This is all the more remarkable when it comes to communicating with external solutions or platforms (partners and / or competitors). This multiplicity of exchanges and types of exchanges generates a great deal of complexity and highlights the need to master the exchange system as effectively as possible. Berger Levraut today lacks visibility on existing exchanges and mechanisms to evaluate them (Leal, Guédria, & Panetto, 2019) which complicates the detection of dysfunctions and the discovery of their origins.

Moreover, it is essential for the Berger-Levrault applications to be able to adapt to the new rules and standards while continuing to integrate the dematerialization of the public service. The evolution of these modalities has an almost systematic impact on the exchange of data put in place to ensure interoperability. Hence the need to build flexible and scalable exchange architectures and to follow the evolution of these exchanges.

These transformations imply a large volume of data exchanged and subject to variations that can be strong during periods of "high attendance" such as elections by electronic vote. The very nature of exchanges can be affected especially with the multiplicity of connected objects (Buyya & Dastjerdi, 2016). These are increasingly used by public institutions for the benefit of the management of city facilities or user services. The increase in volumes of data exchanged therefore implies the implementation of exchange architectures that are able to support the load but also the great variability of the types and frequencies of data production. This requires distributed architectures (in infrastructure and flow), adaptable or even self-adaptable (Gascon-Samson et al 2015) to promote the system's resistance to faults while avoiding potential congestion phenomena.

Based on this reflection, a research project was conducted in partnership by Berger-Levrault and the DISP laboratory (Amokrane et al., 2018). These early works have identified a set of scientific and technical barriers:

• Lack of visibility on existing interoperability exchanges. Indeed, the current exchanges are not traced and the existing monitoring mechanisms focus mainly on low level information, such as the performance of the infrastructure or the use of the memory, without correlation with business information. In addition, few methods for evaluating interoperability are concerned with the effective evaluation (a posteriori of the implementation) of the interoperability of the data, and few of them are tooled (Leal, Guédria, & Panetto, 2019).

• The complexity of trade maintenance. This is due to the lack of traceability of the exchanges, on the one hand, and that of the evolution of the exchange architecture configurations on the other hand. This complicates the identification of failures or dysfunctions and the analysis of their causes, and poses difficulties for the setting up of mechanisms of alerts or significant notifications. In addition, the lack of capitalisation of information relating to trade does not allow to consider a forecast maintenance.

• The development of the different modules of the exchange system is manual and the remediation of malfunctions is done in an ad hoc manner. In addition to the cost of development and correction that this implies, this does not meet the responsiveness requirements of some business areas. Hence the need to build adaptable exchange systems using dynamic interoperability hubs (Agostinho, et al., 2016).

The objective of this thesis proposal is to produce an approach to the implementation cycle of application exchanges, from design to maintenance, which will enhance the reliability and resilience of the interoperability exchange system. The solution will ultimately orchestrate all the application and service exchanges to ensure optimisation of the use of software and infrastructure resources of public institutions.

To meet the needs in terms of interoperability, the work to be carried out is articulated in two axes that we structure as follows:

- A flexible architecture for the implementation of interoperability. Here we consider the basic functionalities reflecting the activities necessary for the establishment of the means of interoperability.

- A reflexive architecture for managing interoperability at a meta-level. This axis relates to setting up means of administration, monitoring and maintenance of the exchange network set up for interoperability.

The work must also incorporate the concepts of security, scalability and usability. Requirements to be met when developing any solution to lift the locks and meet the objectives of this thesis work.

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