Exploring The Dynamic Integration of Heterogeneous Services

David C. Wyld et al. (Eds) : CSEN, SIPR, NCWC - 2016
pp. 103–110, 2016. © CS & IT-CSCP 2016 DOI : 10.5121/csit.2016.61009
EXPLORING THE DYNAMIC
INTEGRATION OF HETEROGENEOUS
SERVICES
Makaziwe Makamba, Jabu Mtsweni and Ernest Ketcha Ngassam
1
Department of Computer Engineering,
University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
55423434@mylife.unisa.ac.za
2
CSIR, Meiring Naude Road, Pretoria, South Africa
makamba.makaziwe93@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
The increase need for services to handle a plethora of business needs within the enterprise
landscape has yielded to an increase in the development of heterogeneous services across the
digital world. In today’s digital economy, services are the key components for communication
and collaboration amongst enterprises internally and externally. Since Internet has stimulated
the use of services, different services have been developed for different purposes prompting
those services to be heterogeneous due to incompatibles approaches relied upon at both
conceptual and exploitation phases. The proliferation of developed heterogeneous services in
the digital world therefore comes along with a range of challenges more precisely in the
integration layer. Traditionally, integration is achieved by using gateways, which require
considerable configuration effort. Many approaches and frameworks have been developed by
different researchers to overcome these challenges, but up to date the challenges of integration
heterogeneous services with minimal user-involvement still exist. In this paper, we are exploring
the challenges of heterogeneous services and characteristics thereof with the aim of developing
a seamless approach that will alleviate some of these challenges in near future. It is therefore of
outmost importance to understand the challenges and characteristics of heterogeneous services
before developing a mechanism that could eliminate these challenges.
KEYWORDS
Integration, heterogeneous, dynamic-integration, services, and heterogeneous-services.
1. INTRODUCTION
The rapid evolution of internet connectivity and service enterprises has raise potential interaction
with many other service enterprises across the globe. In this context, the services are defined as
an abstracted, logical view of actual programs that exchange messages between provider agent
and requester [1]. A service is also defined as an abstract resource that represents a capability of
performing tasks that form a coherent functionality [2]. The key to these services is loosely
coupled nature, where the service interface is independent of the implementation. The increasing

104 Computer Science & Information Technology (CS & IT)
number of heterogeneous services has made a significant drawback on the scalability, integration
and the performance of the services [3]. Heterogeneous service in this context is defined as a
uniqueness of services that are developed on different environments using different techniques
and architectures to complete a specific purpose. These services have to interact with each other
to achieve a certain business goal. As the development of services is increasing in enormous way
across the domain, there is a need to find appropriate approach that will allow these
heterogeneous services to be dynamically integrated without using hard-wiring approaches,
which are tiresome [3]. There are traditional methods of integrating these heterogeneous services;
however these traditional methods are not adequate as the require user-intervention when there is
a change in service that need to be integrated. The traditional methods have some problems, such
as the code complexity more difficult to maintain, lead the efficiency of the bottleneck easily [4].
It is therefore, essential to develop a method that will enable dynamic integration of the
heterogeneous services without the need for user-intervention.
This paper is focusing on identifying the challenges of heterogeneous services integration;
describe the characteristic of heterogeneous services and discussing the advantages and
limitations of the existing integration models.
The remainder of the paper will discuss the heterogeneous services integration in Section 2.
Section 3, will discuss the characteristics of heterogeneous services, the challenges of
heterogeneous services which is the core of this paper will be discussed in Section 4 of this paper.
The related work on what other researchers developed to alleviate these challenges will be
discussed in section 5. Section 6 will conclude the paper with the recommendations of what
needs to be developed to eliminate these challenges.
2. HETEROGENEOUS SERVICE INTEGRATION
Most of the services are heterogeneous, which means they are executed under different platforms,
designed using different architectures and programming languages [5]. Heterogeneous services
are services that are developed by diverse vendors for different purposes on different platforms,
using different architectures; different protocols and different languages [6]. These heterogeneous
services need to be integrated. Heterogeneous service integration is not a new phenomenal in the
field of integration. Integrating heterogeneous services in a dynamic manner may improve if it
could include prescriptive or solution-oriented knowledge where the result from scientific
justification (predicting, understanding or explaining phenomena) can be used in designing
solutions to this complex problems [7].
However, heterogeneous service integration has become major issue in the area of integration.
This is motivated by complexity of these heterogeneous services and independent services when
they need to communicate with one another to achieve a specific business goal. Service
integration has to be performed for these services to communicate.
Service integration in this context is defined as the integration of discrete IT services components
into a coherent set of end-to-end service bound by Operation Level Agreements (OLAs) and
Services Level Agreements (SLAs) [9]. The service integration is a challenge when these
heterogeneous services need to interact. There are certain aspects that make these services to be
heterogeneous, which results to challenge when these services need to be integrated. The
following section will discuss in details the characteristics of heterogeneous services.

Computer Science & Information Technology (CS & IT) 105
3. HETEROGENEOUS SERVICES CHARACTERISTICS
Inter-enterprise integration is an essential requirement for today’s successful business [10]. With
the aim of overcoming heterogeneity, various technologies and standards for the definition of
languages, vocabularies and integration patterns are being developed. However, before discussing
the pattern and the technologies that have been developed, there is a need to define the
heterogeneous services and the characteristic of these services. As the above section has defined
the heterogeneous services, this section will discuss the characteristics of these heterogeneous
services. After an extensive literature review and the empirical study that was conducted. We
have discovered that services are heterogeneous based on the following aspects; environment,
technology, architecture and programming language [11]. As Hajiji mentioned in 2012, there are
many fundamental aspects that synthesize the heterogeneity in these services [12]. The
heterogeneity of services is also characterized by 4 fundamental aspects.
1. Environment- Due to execution environment, as some services are developed to be executed on
different environments such as Mobile Services, Cloud Services, Desktop services, Web
Services, ATM Services and many more. These services are explicitly developed to run on these
environments for a specific purpose.
2. Systems and Technology- There are several services that run on specific system. Some
services are developed to run on Android, some on IOS, while some run on Linux, Windows and
Mac OS. Systems and technology are making these services heterogeneous.
3. Architecture- Architecture is another fundamental aspect that differentiates services. Some
services are developed for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and some on Enterprise
application Integration (EAI) while some other architecture allows services to return a JSON and
while some are allowed to return Extensible Mark-up Language (XML).
4. Programming Language- This is another component that makes services to be heterogeneous.
Some services are developed using php while others are developed using Java, C++ and C#. This
makes services to be heterogeneous as they are difficult to integrate due to different programming
languages [9].
These above characteristics are granting a challenge on service integration environment. As the
figure 1 below depicts, services can be heterogeneous because of the deployment environment,
could be mobile, desktop or laptop, and the architecture that is used to develop the services.
However these services can be heterogeneous but they need to talk to each other to share
information.
As it shown in the picture, these services are deployed in different environment; they are using
different architecture and different technology. There are services that are deployed for mobile
phone, there are services that are created for desktops and there are services are designed for
laptops, however these service needs to interact with each other. It is therefore critical to integrate
these services in a dynamic manner. A manner that will not require user-intervention, as it delays
the progress of integration task. In the following section, this paper will discuss in details the key
challenges of heterogeneous service integration.

Figure 1: Heterogeneous Service Integration [9]
4. CHALLENGES OF HETEROGENEOUS SERVICE INTEGRATION
In today’s world, many enterprises use services as a main core of communication. The challenge
that most organizations are facing is to provide a method that could allow dynamic integration of
heterogeneous service, a method that can allow these services to work together to address
business goals that constantly evolve [13]. There are several heterogeneous services that have
been developed by different vendors, such as mobile services, cloud services, web services and
others [14]. Most of these services are integrated manually by using Application programming
interface (APIs), Adapters, ESBs and many more. This led the companies to lose profit in their
business as the integration task becomes cumbersome for the developer, as he/she needs to be
involved when integrating these services. These services has varied and multiple integration
points. This Increases the challenge of integrating heterogeneous services on the fly. Each service
is independent and performs its own task, which might be valuable to a cohesive system. The
other challenge that makes it difficult for integration is multiple data models and multiple
instances of the services. Achieving a seamless flow of information requires a significant
integration method. A method that can scale with business needs as new applications and
platforms appear. The current methods of integrating heterogeneous services are very tedious,
inflexible and time consuming when the services change requirements [14].
One of the aspects that make these services to be complex to integrate is the 4 mentioned
fundamental characteristics that are mentioned above. As these services run on different platform,
environment, and system and developed using different programming languages. It makes it
difficult to integrate them as they are heterogeneous. Most of the services are currently integrated
using manual approach which is to develop an API for each service that needs to be integrated.
When there is a change on a service an API has to be modified which make it unmanageable
when there is increase in number of services. Hence this manual method is regarded as an
inadequate method [14].

Integrating heterogeneous services in order to connect their functionality is utmost importance for
promoting deployment dynamic integration of heterogeneous service. It is therefore important to
understand the characteristic of these heterogeneous services and explore the challenges of
integrating them in order to develop a mechanism to that will enable dynamic integration of these
services. A method that will allow heterogeneous services to integrated with a minimal user-
involvement. Hence we are exploring the challenges so that we can develop a method that will
alleviate these challenges in near future.
Many studies have been conducted to resolve the issue of heterogeneous service integration. The
following section will discuss more in details about the related work.
5. RELATED WORK
The challenges of heterogeneous service integration is not a new phenomenal in the field of
integration. Many researchers have explored the different paradigm to develop solutions that can
eliminate these challenges of heterogeneous service integration. However, up to today, the
challenges have not been resolve completely. A new service integration system was developed by
Huiyang (2006) to resolve the existing challenges. This system only allows the integration of
services at a component level [7]. In this system a user can insert common service logic to their
business logic [7]. The system establishes an agent between service components; this was done to
allow the request and orchestration to identify the components in a correct manner [7]. However,
this system requires a developer’s intervention to integrate, modify and change certain service
requirements.
Another agent-based web service integration model was developed by Yu, et al (2008) to
integrate the services and ensuring the Quality of Services (QOS) of the integration system [8]
This QOS-based integration was developed to improve services integration efficiency and
minimize the integration cost through the selection mechanism. However, this mechanism
worked for integrating services but it does not eliminate the user-involvement challenge when the
change is required on a services. Another integrated model was proposed and the integration
framework of component-based was constructed by Shaoba et al (2010) to solve the problems of
heterogeneous service integration [4]. This integration model was done for user management and
user access control and register service component. This framework was mainly used to
standardize enterprise business processes, to coordinate the data processing, and to build
configurable enterprise service bus; data management modules [4].This framework has achieved
data synchronization between heterogeneous systems but has not solved the problem of
heterogeneous service integration with a minimal user-involvement. Hence, there is a need to
develop a mechanism that will dynamically integrate heterogeneous services without a need for
user-intervention. The following table will give more advantages and limitations of the current
methods of integration.

Table1: Comparisons of integration models
Integration model Advantages Limitations
ESB Services are connected to this logical
bus through smart connectors, which
encapsulate system functionality
and provide a layer of abstraction
between bus and application.
ESB use of open communication
standards, connectivity between bus
and applications is established.
ESB uses several integration points.
It’s easy to onboard new services and
new nodes when using ESB.
Requires ongoing management of
message versions to ensure the intended
benefit of loose coupling. Though ESB
systems can require a significant effort
to implement, they produce no
commercial value without the
subsequent development of SOA
services for the ESB. ESB have lot of
upfront overheads. When using ESB
there is a need to define canonical
message format.
The developmental complexity.
It normally requires more hardware
than simple point-to-point messaging.
ESB becomes a single point of failure.
It requires analysis skills to configure,
manage and operate ESB.
EAI EAI solutions provide process
management functionality to
orchestrate inter-application message
exchanges, and an administration
console to monitor and track the
workings of the hub. Maintains
information integrity across multiple
systems. EAI focuses on sharing both
business data and business process.
EAI focus on integrating services on
the data level, application level and the
method level.
EAI is more on point-to-point effort,
which becomes unmanageable as
number of services increases.
EAI consume considerable time and
effort to deploy, and are subject to high
project failure rates.
Requires expect knowledge to integrate
services using EAI.
Require a fair amount of up front
design, which many managers are not
able to envision.

Middleware Middleware enable services to
exchange messages, even though we do
not know the platform of other service.
It guarantees throughput, reliability and
efficiency.
It flexible to modify and separate
interfaces from the applications.
Independence of layers and database.
Transparency and it easily customize
all components.
It uses API to integrate services.
User-intervention is required whenever
there is a change in services that need
to be integrated. It is limited in terms of
scalability, each client adds overhead. It
uses low-level languages.
A small change is the environment
development can lead to major
downtime of real-time applications. It
is expensive.
Due to these series of limitations on the existing models of integration, this is a reason why there
is a need to develop a method that will enable dynamic integration of heterogeneous service. Due
to advantages of dynamic integration model, it would be easy to integrate heterogeneous service
without a need of user-intervention. This could eliminate the challenges that many business
enterprise are facing. As we can identify the gap that needs to be closed, dynamic integration
could be a solution to this existing challenge. Dynamic integration would be a proper solution
because it does not need user-intervention. It does not need a developer to modify API as the
services will automatically update them. It would be scalable since services are integrated on the
fly. In these days is hard to live normally without having to rely on some kind of technology.
Technology is everywhere and used in different ways by all kinds of people in different work
areas. Enterprises are now exposing their business as services for global visibility and for
automation of business processes [15]. It is important to understand the current challenges and
what has been developed to eradicate this challenge. In future we will develop a dynamic method
of integrating heterogeneous service without a need of user-intervention.
6. CONCLUSION
The challenges of heterogeneous service integration are affecting multiple organizations. The
technology must be flexible and scalable in reconciling semantic differences amongst these
information exchange entities. It is therefore essential to have mechanisms that will dynamic
integrate heterogeneous services, to make integration as seamless as possible. Hence in this
paper, we described the challenges, characteristics of integration heterogeneous services, and
comparison of existing models of integration so that it can be easy to develop a method that will
close the existing gaps. In future we will develop a method that will allow dynamic integration of
these heterogeneous services.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is undertaken within the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in
Defense, Peace Safety and Security (DPSS). The support from University of South Africa
(UNISA) is also acknowledged.

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AUTHOR
Makaziwe Makamba is a PhD candidate at the University of South Africa. She
completed her Masters in 2012 at the University of Fort Hare in Alice, South Africa.
Her area of interest is service integration, e-services and the dynamic integration.

Exploring The Dynamic Integration of Heterogeneous Services

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