The arrowhead approach for SOA application development and documentation

The Arrowhead project aims to address the technical and applicative issues associated with cooperative automation based on Service Oriented Architectures. The problems of developing such kind of systems are mainly due to the lack of adequate development and service documentation methodologies, which would ease the burden of reusing services on different applications. The Arrowhead project proposes a technical framework to efficiently support the development of such systems, which includes several tools for documentation of services and to support the development of SOA-based installations. The work presented in this paper describes the approach which has been developed for the first generation pilots to support the documentation of their structural services. Each service, system and system-of-systems within the Arrowhead Framework must be documented and described in such way that it can be implemented, tested and deployed in an interoperable way. This paper presents the first steps of realizing the Arrowhead vision for interoperable services, systems and systems-of-systems.