Sustainable interoperability: The future of Internet based industrial enterprises

Enterprise Interoperability is a high-impact productivity factor both within the private and the public sector, affecting the overall quality, yield time and cost of transactions, as well as the design of manufacturing operations or digital public services. This paper addresses the rationale and analysis of the results of the special issue on sustainable interoperability, which is defined here as focusing on novel strategies, methods and tools to maintain and sustain the interoperability of enterprise systems in networked environments as they evolve with their environments. The paper starts by reviewing current state of the systems interoperability research domain and describing the constitution of the community of systems interoperability research and application. We then outline this community's progress on the development of a science base for Enterprise Interoperability. The paper then identifies how each paper in this special issue contributes to the body of knowledge on sustainable interoperability, according to three main development areas: Enterprise Network Configuration; Architectures and Data Models; and Fundamentals for an Enterprise Interoperability Science Base. Finally the paper discusses the aggregate contributions towards sustainable interoperability, in an evolving technological, business and social environment.