Supporting architectural decision making for systems-of-systems design under uncertainty

Abstract

For the design and integration of complex systems-of-systems, various architectural decisions for recurring design problems need to be made. This requires that the software architects consider various design issues and alternatives, make trade-offs for competing requirements, and adapt the decisions to specific technologies and systems. Documentations of reusable architectural design decisions (ADDs), e.g., pattern-based decisions, provide rather informal guidelines for making recurring ADDs. These and other factors introduce many sources of uncertainty in the architectural decision making process. Existing approaches do not consider this inherent uncertainty of architectural decision making, which has been until now largely ad hoc and informal, without explicit, automated support. Apart from that, the design rationale for repeated ADDs often remains undocumented, leading to loss of architectural knowledge. To address these problems we propose to provide semi-automated support for decision making and documentation of reusable ADDs under uncertainty using a fuzzy logic expert system. We motivate our approach using a systems-ofsystems example from the industry automation area in which our approach has been applied.

Model-based Confidentiality Analysis under Uncertainty

“…Values such as the probability that a particular component is used, or the reliability of a component contribute to the analysis of uncertainty [14]. Other approaches use reusable architecture design decisions and fuzzy logic to derive the quality of software architecture under uncertainty [29]. GuideArch [11] also uses fuzzy values for design space exploration under uncertainty.…”

Supporting architectural design of acknowledged SoS

“…Even though the drawn conclusions may have been influenced by the researchers' B.3. SLR: List of Selected Studies Two-level process model for integrated system development (Rossak et al, 1994) Quantifiable software architecture for dependable systems of systems (Liang and Luqi, 2003) A System-of-Systems Engineering GEOSS: Architectural approach (Butterfield et al, 2008) A process for systems-of-systems architecting (Griendling and Mavris, 2010) A design methodology for real-time distributed software architecture based on the behavioral properties and its application to advanced automotive software (Aoyama and Tanabe, 2011) A method for the generation and evaluation of architecture alternatives on the cloud (Iacobucci and Mavris, 2011) Architecting ultra-large-scale green information systems (Chen and Kazman, 2012) The process of architecting for software/system engineering (Chigani and Balci, 2012) Scaling up software architecture analysis Towards integrated rule-driven software development for IT ecosystems (Mensing et al, 2012) A data-centric capability-focused approach for system-of-systems architecture modeling and analysis (Ge et al, 2013) Supporting architectural decision making for systems-of-systems design under uncertainty (Lytra and Zdun, 2013) Goncalves2015 A meta-process to construct software architectures for system of systems (Gonçalves et al, 2015) tails of activities while managers can be more interest in general aspects and results of ongoing work. It is also possible to structure different levels of abstraction in the same process, allowing project managers to choose how complete is the process that they need.…”

“…Supporting architectural decision making for systems-of-systems design under uncertainty (Lytra and Zdun, 2013) Model-driven systems engineering for netcentric system of systems with DEVS unified process (Mittal and Risco Martin, 2013) Perspectives and challenges of reference architectures in multi software product line Issues and challenges in ecosystems for federated embedded systems (Papatheocharous et al, 2013) Large-scale Smart Grids As System of Systems (Pérez et al, 2013) Platform based approach for automation of workflows in a system of systems (Ploom et al, 2013) A Model-Driven Approach for Evaluating System of Systems (Xia et al, 2013) Perspectives on System of Systems for pilgrimage ritual guidance and management (Alwakeel et al, 2014) Appendix B…”

“…In order to produce this environment, the authors propose the use of Markov Chains and Petri-Nets, Network Theory, System Dynamics and Discrete Event Simulation, and Agent-based modeling. Lytra and Zdun (2013) proposed an approach that aims to provide semi-automated support for specific recurring candidate architectural solutions and resolve their inherent uncertainty by using specialized fuzzy models to structure and document alternative candidate architectural solutions. The authors use Fuzzy-logic (Zadeh, 1965) to allow the numerical encoding of the vague linguistic values software engineers describing requirements as well as forces and consequences of reusable candidate architectural solutions into a fuzzy model of rules.…”