Collaboration-based Modeling for System of Systems

Recent advances in ubiquitous computing and communication technologies has resulted in the field of SoS engineering. SoS is defined as a class of systems that are built from components which are large scale systems in their own right [1]. SoS are highly dynamic systems where interaction among the component systems are dynamically created, in response to a certain situation, to form a SoS.

Problems in creation of SoS stems from the fact that they are developed upon existing constituent systems (CS) which are autonomous and independent [2], and must cooperate dynamically to contribute towards the goal of SoS. Autonomy and independence implies that CS have local goals which might be updated over time, this can conflict with global goals of SoS which can abstain SoS from achieving its desired behavior. SoS evolves over time, requirements may change and new systems may be added which can make the behavior of SoS unstable. SoS runs in highly dynamic environment where inability to adapt to contextual changes can result in invalid operation of SoS.

Since SoS evolves from collaboration among CS, our goal is to provide collaboration (role) based modeling for SoS. Collaborations are defined among the role CS play. To support the concept of dynamic collaboration, concepts from DEECo [3] component model have been taken, where entry and exit predicates are defined that marks the situations that define the beginning and end of dynamic collaboration. During the life of the SoS, SoS must respond to contextual changes by updating the role collaboration graph either by changing roles or adding or removing new roles. Since CS are autonomous and have their own local goals, it is important to adapt the behavior of CS in order to enable CS to participate in global goal of SoS. For this purpose we aim to use roles to superimpose certain behavior of CS while they participate in SoS. As a result of these efforts, we envision to provide the ability to SoS engineer to orchestrate the behavior of SoS in a way that the SoS level goals are always met.

[1] Maier, Mark W., Architecting principles for systems-of-systems, Systems Engineering, vol. 1, p. 267–284, 1998

[2] David Fisher, An Emergent Perspective on Interoperation in Systems of Systems, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2006

[3] Bures, Tomas and Gerostathopoulos, Ilias and Hnetynka, Petr and Keznikl, Jaroslav and Kit, Michal and Plasil, Frantisek, DEECO: An Ensemble-based Component System, Proceedings of the 16th International ACM Sigsoft Symposium on Component-based Software Engineering, CBSE ’13