Integration Architecture for Smart Campus Services and Solutions

Abstract

Introduction: The Antonio José Camacho University Institution (UNIAJC) has identified, through the Ecosystem Smart campus research project, there are complex communication problems between applications built as silos, where the redundancy of information is common and the processes they support require refinement. This problem is quite common, not only for UNIAJC, but in general for any university. The reason is that as institutions evolve, the applications that support their processes are built solely with the vision of providing a solution of a specific need, without counting on the entire context of pre-existing solutions, often due to the haste to resolve. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) aim to resolve these types of situations gradually, due to the technical difficulty of the implementations. This work focuses on exposing the definition of the integration architecture proposed by Smart Campus for UNIAJC, establishing the way in which the services will interact and taking into account the current infrastructure limitations.

Objective: To define an integration architecture that allows easy scaling and good performance of the mechanisms that communicate the applications, which cohabit at the Antonio José Camacho University institution.

Method: A brief description of the methodological design of the study.  The architectural design of the solution is approached, starting from the general approach, where the needs to be solved are described using the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) pattern and are represented by a component diagram. The information is then expanded to a detailed focus. In the latter, the type of service to be built (SOAP or REST) is selected and its architecture is exposed. Finally, using ATAM (Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method), the effectiveness of the solution.

Results:  The definition of an SOA-based application integration architecture, detailing the software architecture for building the solution's web services. This, taking into account the Institution's infrastructure and resource limitations to achieve a performance between 500 p / s to 1000 p / s (requests per second) that avoids thread problems or resource blocking

Conclusions: SOA enables solutions to communication and application integration problems, both in business and educational environments, increasing the maintainability, scalability and reuse of the systems and components developed under this architecture. On the other hand, the ATAM architecture review model facilitated the definition and evaluation of the architecture, achieving an understanding of the current environment, the identification of quality attributes, tests and expected results.