Assisting the evolutionary development of SoS with reconfiguration patterns

Abstract

International audienceSystem of systems (SoS) engineering is an emerging approach to deal with complex systems that have low or no control over their constituents. An SoS must adapt itself not only to the willingness of its constituents to participate or disengage, but also to evolving needs. As reconfiguration is a routine task, the SoS architect needs specific assistance, especially to easily identify reusable solution principles and to track her/his decisions in the design of reconfiguration. To address these issues, we propose to introduce the concept of reconfiguration pattern based on prior design and architectural patterns. These patterns constitute well-documented, principled and adaptable solution building blocks. We illustrate our approach with one reconfiguration pattern applied on an example based on the French communication system for emergency services

Modeling System of Systems configurations

“…For our future work, we plan to rely on the modeled configurations following the proposed process in order to further study the reconfiguration of the SoS architecture. To this end, we will reuse our previous work [15], that defines reconfiguration patterns, in order to model how the SoS changes its configuration each time an evolution is required.…”

Externalizing patterns for simulations in software engineering of systems-of-systems

“…However, they do not tackle SoS context, and they do not externalize patterns for the conception of a simulation. Finally, Petitdemange et al established a solution based on patterns for reconfiguration of SoS software architectures [25]. Despite involving SoS domain and reconfiguration, they do not externalize patterns for simulation.…”

Design process for system of systems reconfigurations

“…Ref. 22, 23 proposed reconfiguration patterns to document design decisions within reconfiguration. While reconfiguration patterns provide reusable solutions to recurrent problems, these previous works do not provide any accompanying design processes.…”

“…The architect also schedules atomic reconfiguration operations such that changes are performed in the correct order for the transition architecture. To help in this task, a catalog of reconfiguration patterns 23 prescribes well‐known solutions to recurrent reconfiguration problems. Reconfiguration patterns provide documentation of these well‐known solutions and notably concerning properties, such as service availability or degradation, such that the architect can more easily compare with the constraints specified in the transition architecture.…”