摘要: |
Without question, the most elusive and confusing attribute of open systems is interoperability. The reason for this elusiveness is varied, such as vendors do not like it and technology changes too rapidly, but confusion arises from the lack of understanding of the concept itself. Interoperability is not an all-or-nothing proposition; it can be viewed as multiple levels of cooperation between computers. In the transportation community today, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are widely heterogeneous due to technology change, engineering trade-off, and legacy infrastructure. The challenge to the community at large, and particularly the National Traffic Control/IVHS Communications Protocol (NTCIP) effort, is how to deploy interoperable ITS in the center-to-center context. This paper takes an in-depth look at what makes up interoperability and why maintainability and performance are important considerations. Two approaches, communication stack and application layer, are discussed in relationship to transportation interoperability with a suggestion of which to use where. This paper then takes a brief look at a relatively new object-oriented technology and why that technology could help solve the interoperability problems. |