ABSTRACT

So far, we have described systems that can be analyzed in an Object-oriented manner, systems that are designed, and systems that are artificial or human-made. We described various processes, methodologies, and frameworks that help define system structure and behavior. The DEVS formalism is one such formalism that lends itself to a formal study of system structure and behavior at various levels of abstractions through the notion of an event. A netcentric system is just another system where the component subsystems are heterogeneous in nature and may have different execution platforms. However, they are designed to solve two major issues: integration and interoperability. While integration is mostly a technical exercise with heavy emphasis on technological solutions, interoperability is more complex, as it happens at various levels of systems specifications, for example, pragmatic, semantic, and syntactic. Integration can largely solve syntactic interoperability, but for any two systems to interoperate or perform an operation together, they have to understand each other’s semantics and context (pragmatics). A netcentric system brings forth a set of standards that help automate syntactic interoperability through Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), where each system is made modular and finally integrated. Much work is needed in the research area of semantic and pragmatic interoperability. This is an open-ended problem that needs to be further explored.