Modeling System of Systems configurations

Abstract

System of Systems (SoS) engineering is a challenging research direction because an SoS has distinctive characteristics in comparison to distributed systems. UPMD and SysML provide adequate frameworks and notations which help in the process of modeling and architecting SoS. Projects such as DANSE and COMPASS have selected the most relevant views among the numerous views of UPDM. By nature, an SoS evolves after its initial deployment. To deal with evolutions, the architect needs to model configurations, what was not considered in previous state of the art. Modeling configuration is indeed key before we can model the evolution itself. In this paper, our contribution is a new modeling process, based on UPDM and SysML, that helps the architect in designing the configuration of an SoS. The proposed process is illustrated with the case study of the French emergency service.

Design process for system of systems reconfigurations

“…The presented work is part of a project to address the question: How should the architect proceed to evolve an SoS after deployment as part of evolutionary development? In our previous work, we proposed an SoS architecture modeling framework to obtain different SoS configurations 2 . Configurations are useful to study how an architect could address reconfiguration in an SoS environment.…”

“…In the context of this paper, we focus on shorter lived SoSs that are specifically targeted at one operation: here, a rescue operation inspired by the French civil protection 2 . Figure 1 overviews this SoS, whose mission is to protect property and people in case of a flooding situation.…”

“…Therefore, in this paper, we view reconfiguration as the design, implementation, and deployment of any change in the SoS architecture. We extend our previous work 2 by proposing a design process to guide the architect in charge of designing a reconfiguration, noting the tasks that must be accomplished to develop a reconfiguration for an evolutionary development. We apply our process to one of the configurations obtained from the case study scenarios.…”

“…We present the background and related work in Section 2 to introduce the concepts and modeling languages used. This section also reviews how the SoS architecture is modeled in configurations according to our previous work 2 . Section 3 describes the dedicated design process for reconfiguration.…”

“…In the context of this paper, we focus on shorter lived SoSs that are specifically targeted at one operation: here, a rescue operation inspired by the French civil protection. 2…”