A Contribution to the Architectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems-of-Systems for Critical Embedded Systems

Abstract

Systems of systems (SoS) have gained important status in industry and academy as a possible response to the growing complexity of software systems. According to this approach, bigger and more complex systems can be obtained by the combination of different and operationally independent systems. Thus, this approach can improve software systems maintainability and evolvability by composing smaller and manageable parts. In another perspective, software architectures are recognized as the backbone of every successful system and to be essential for the achievement of quality attributes, such as integrability, performance, and dynamism. In particular, the representation of the architecture plays an important role during the entire software system life cycle, since it is the most important artifact for communicating the architecture to all its stakeholders. Besides that, the representation can also be used for early analysis of the software architecture. But, despite the acknowledgement of software architectures for the construction of software systems, we observe that their application in the domain of SoS has not yet been sufficiently explored. In addition, the representation of software architectures for this domain is still an open topic, since it is commonly conducted informally. In fact, there is a lack of studies dedicated to investigating the application of software architectures for this domain, including quality requirements that must be considered in their description. Thus, investigations in this direction can improve the development of software architectures of SoS by contributing to their appropriate description. As a result, we expect that this work could contribute to the SoS domain by creating a consistent basis--- composed of guidelines, methods and techniques ---from which software architecture descriptions can be build. This contribution is directed to enable early support for design analysis and conformance to selected quality requirements.