A Process to Establish, Model and Validate Missions of Systems-of-Systems in Reference Architectures.
Résumé
Systems-of-Systems (SoSs) have risen in response to needs of
achieving complex missions that can be only carried out from
the cooperation among diverse, independent constituent sys-
tems. Understanding of missions and emergent behaviors
in SoSs as well as the complicated interactions among con-
stituent systems are a quite time demanding and challenging
tasks. In another perspective, reference architectures (RAs)
are a special type of software architecture that promotes
reuse of knowledge to develop and evolve software systems,
and mainly to promote interoperability among software sys-
tems. In spite of the relevance of RAs, these architectures
have not still incorporated the concept of missions of SoSs
and how to adequately manage them. Hence, such RAs have
presented a limited ability to support SoSs development and
evolution. In this scenario, the main contribution of this pa-
per is to improve the feasibility of RAs in developing SoSs.
For this, we present a systematic process to establish, model,
and validate missions of SoSs and also incorporate them into
RAs. To evaluate our process, we applied it in a RA for SoSs
in the healthcare domain. Results achieved until now show
that RAs designed considering our process could contribute
to decrease expended time and effort at early stages of SoSs
engineering.