System of systems comprises interacting, heterogeneous, autonomous components with incomplete information about their inner states, and about the surrounding environment. Many interactions are often not rigorously defined, and change dynamically. System of systems usually exhibits emergent behavior that cannot be predicted by analyzing static properties of the components, and is not always permissible. This paper suggests that the designer can improve system's behavior by substituting (part of) regular interactions with smart mediated interactions that bolster up shared situation awareness of the system's components and thus strengthens system's capability to monitor and partially control its emergent behavior. This paper discusses smart mediated interactions that focus on awareness of temporal features and on estimates of spatial location of the components. Interactions are assembled into proactive middleware that forms a backbone of system of systems.
The Command and Control (C2) system that provide information to the actors in a conflict has always been a key target for technology advancement. The ongoing development of automated digital military information systems has enabled, and is demanding the development of specific functional area support systems. The focus of communication systems and methods is shifting away from human to human communication towards human to machine and machine to machine communication. Along with this change have come proliferation of operating systems, data representation schemata, data exchange methods and other aspects that now confront us with a "confusion of languages" [1].The paper describes the information exchange issues and challenges involved in creating shared situation awareness in the described systems. Some existing models for both information representation and exchange are described and a proactive communication model for information exchange in a distributed system is presented. The proactive communication model caters for the data requirements of the data consumers, the objective being to provide the information required for forming good situational awareness of the data consumer. The proactive communication model relies on a middleware [5] that is able to acquire the information required by the consumer and to cater for the restrictions set by the data consumer on the requested data. The paper describes the middleware and how it can be applied in the above-described systems.Index Terms -cooperative distributed systems, interactive computing, middleware (for subscription and distribution of situational information), situation awareness, validation and verification
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