Interfacing AM/FM/GIS with enterprise and Operations Systems

The Solution – Interfacing Standards
As an alternative to custom-developed interfaces, interfacing standards needed to be defined so that different systems could communicate with one another. In addition, data flows required between such systems would have to be packaged in such a way that vendors could pass information without restructuring or even revealing their proprietary data structures. Object-oriented programming techniques were the most obvious way to handle this interfacing dilemma. More specifically, Microsoft’s COM/DCOM architecture could be employed to facilitate communications.

One of the leading Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) vendors, SAP, has developed their own interfacing methodology and has used it for some time to facilitate communications between its R/3 system and a wide variety of complimentary systems. This methodology is called the Business Application Programming Interface (BAPI). The figure below illustrates the structure of a BAPI and the business objects that it contains.

Figure 1 The Structure of SAP’s Business Object
SAP Business Components are comprised of a set of related SAP Business Objects that represent all of the functionality and behavior of the business entity. An SAP Business Object (Figure 1) consists of a business object kernel which contains the core business logic. The second layer contains constraints and business rules (responsible for integrity). The third layer contains the methods, input event control and output events. The final layer is the access layer (COM/DCOM, Java, and CORBA). DCOM enables COM software components to communicate directly over a network and is designed for use across multiple network transports. DCOM will work with Java applets and ActiveX components through its use of COM.