Thesis defense by Ahmed AHMED

Over the past ten years, IT and industrial infrastructure have evolved from monolithic systems to heterogeneous, autonomous, and widely distributed systems. Not all systems can coexist in isolation and require their data to be shared in order to increase business productivity. In fact, we are moving toward larger, more complex systems where millions of systems must be integrated. Thus, the need for a low-cost, rapid interoperability solution is becoming essential. Today, solutions impose standards or middleware to manage this issue. However, these solutions are not sufficient and often require specific ad-hoc developments. This work therefore proposes the study and development of a generic, modular, agnostic, and extensible interoperability architecture based on the principles of model-driven architecture and the concepts of separation of concerns. It aims to promote interoperability and data exchange between heterogeneous systems in real time without requiring systems to comply with specific standards or technologies. The proposal applies to industrial use cases in the context of the French gas distribution network. The theoretical and empirical validation of our proposal corroborates our hypotheses that interoperability between heterogeneous systems can be achieved using the concepts of separation of concerns and model-driven engineering, and that the cost and time required to promote interoperability is reduced by favoring the characteristics of reusability and extensibility.