Model-based alignment and orchestration of heterogeneous homeland security applications enabling composition of system of systems

One of the main challenges for Homeland Security applications is the fact that the different supporting organizations, services, and nations come to the table with existing information technology, supporting established business and organization processes, and using organization-specific data models. This paper shows how to support multi- organization processes with a federation of their heterogeneous IT-solutions based on the alignment and orchestration of applications with regard to the underlying models of those solutions. While processes are orchestrated and aligned top-down, the supporting IT is migrated into a Homeland Security System-of-Systems bottom-up. Web services allow the loose coupling of participating systems and the consistent application of data engineering allows the auto-configuration of data mediation layers. This is made possible by considering first the solutions themselves, and their models (the top-down approach), and only then the application of data engineering to aligning those models (the bottom-up approach).