Establishment of a platform for full interoperability in Systems-of-Systems: a case study in the e-health domain

Abstract

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 systems. Important challenges in SoS engineering are focus of research, due to their dependence on capabilities offered by constituent systems to accomplish their missions; meanwhile, constituent systems are distributed and operational and managerial independent of the SoS. This characteristic originates interoperability issues in SoS, mainly, because the communicated data, procedures, standards, data representation, quality, and interfaces are mostly misunderstood by both SoS and its constituent systems.Despite advances in addressing interoperability problems in complex systems, there is a lack of mechanisms to support all levels of interoperability in SoS, namely, technical, semantic, syntactic, and organizational interoperability. The goal of this research project is to consolidate PaaSoS, a service-oriented platform for SoS. Specifically, in this project is intended to investigate whether PaaSoS is a feasible solution to support full interoperability and promote communication, coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and mediation in SoS. This platform was preliminary designed by the candidate during her Ph.D studies. To conduct this investigation, case studies, and simulations will be conducted. In particular, the PaaSoS will be used in the context of a real System of e-Health systems in the Brazilian scenario.As main result it is intended to consolidate PaaSoS as a mechanism to support full interoperation, promoting the communication, coordination, collaboration, mediation, and integration of constituent systems in quality SoS.Moreover, it is expected that PaaSoS could be consolidated as a reference framework to assure constituent systems conformance with SoS missions, policies, and standards. Finally, it is contemplated that in a future, PaaSoS could support reusability, contributing to the development of more cheaper and reliable SoS.