SASoS: supporting development of software architectures for software-intensive systems-of-systems

Abstract

With the advance of computacional technologies and increasing in complexity and size of software systems, a new concept has emerged: Systems of Systems (SoS). This concept refers to software systems built from collaborative integration of operationally independent constituent systems. In this context, several critical embedded systems have been also developed as SoS, for instance, robotics systems and military systems. In another perspective, software architectures have a fundamental role to the development of software systems, mainly regarding to quality attributes, such as interoperability and evolvability. However, it is observed that most of SoS have been developed without attention to their software architectures, what can harm the quality attributes of these systems. Moreover, there is a lack of more consolidated approaches, including processes, methods, techniques and even tools, which support the development of SoS. In this scenario, the main goal of this project is to contribute to facilitate and systematize the building of SoS, focusing on software architectures. Specifically, this research project will propose a process containing methods, techniques, and supporting tools in order to systematize the design of SoS software architectures, more specifically, for critical embedded systems. Aiming at having evidences of the viability of our process, case studies, experiments, and/or surveys will be conducted, involving the design of SoS for two critical domain: robotics systems and flood monitoring systems. As results of this project, we intend to contribute to the Software Architecture, providing a means that supports the building of SoS software architectures. We also intend to contribute to the area of Embedded Systems, as this process could organize architectures of SoS of this area. Moreover, a more general result is to consolidate the research group in Software Architecture and Systems of Systems in ICMC/USP, as well as to promote and consolidate the research cooperation between ICMC/USP and Institut de Recherche en Informatique et Systèmes Aléatoires of Université de Bretagne Sud - IRISA/UBS. (AU)