Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
organizations have or can have on the development of systems and platforms
operating in the real world. Business scenarios, constraints and restrictions advise an
increased level of flexibility in order to assure sustainable and effective environments.
3
Platform Model
The convergence between cloud-based solution and virtualization is not an absolute
novelty. An exhaustive analysis [8,9] is out of paper scope but, recently, this approach
was used in order to reach different goals in the context of different domains.
The last generation of virtual platforms [10], virtual organizations [11], virtual
services [12], techniques for virtual resources management [13]/optimization [14] and
virtual infrastructure [15] are, implicitly or explicitly, referred to the cloud model.
Also a semantic specification of resources is a well known topic for both general
purpose and specific (e.g. industrial resources [16]) purpose.
The proposed model is composed of three converging perspectives:
•
Interoperability model
(Section 3.1)
•
Business model
(Section 3.2)
•
Technical perspective
(Section 3.3)
3.1
Interoperability Model: Vertical Approach
One of the critical and key issues for the improvement of the current interoperability
model is the conceptual evolving from a “horizontal” to a “vertical” approach.
Actually medical systems are logically part of virtual organizations characterized
by different complexity in terms of structure and distribution. Each virtual
organization has its own technological environment.
During the last few years, a progressive convergence among these environments
was aimed (see introduction). The problem is normally approached trying to provide
added (or improved) capabilities among existent systems (Figure 3). This “direct”
solution is effective and efficient but it is just a local solution: the “integration” of a
new system (or resource) implies the need of a “new” solution.
Furthermore, if a new system/resource is integrated in the ecosystem and it has to
be interoperable with the existent ones, an ad-hoc component (proxy) that assures the
interoperability has to be provided for interfacing each existent system/resource.
This last situation is expressed by (1) where n is the number of independent
systems/resources and k is the number of proxies. As showed, if a new resource or
system is integrated, a full-interoperable solution implies the deployment of O(n)
proxies.
k(i) = k(i-1) + n(i-1) → O(n-1) = O(n)
n>2
(1)
The virtualization of resource enables a model of interoperability based on a vertical
approach (Figure 3): resources are available at virtual level and the interoperability
among systems is approached at this abstracted level.
