System of Systems Engineering: Meta-Modelling Perspective

Abstract

Systems-of-Systems (SoS) have emerged as a special type of large-scale complex systems and have been widely used in various fields. An SoS is a result of the integration of a number of pre-existing, independent complex software systems called Constituent Systems (CS). During the SoS Engineering process, the specific characteristics of CSs such as the operational and managerial independence, distribution and the emergent behaviour make the modelling of their structure, relationships and interactions a complex task.On the other hand, Model-Driven-Architecture (MDA) is still one of the most promising software architecture approaches, it provides a method which simplifies SoSs complexity by increasing their abstraction level. The aim of this study is to introduce a software description meta-model that can be used for modelling SoSs. The meta-model highlights the importance of Goals, Roles, Capabilities and CSs concepts for SoS design. These concepts will be translated into an abstract architecture where their composition and relationships are well-defined. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) a Meta-Model for System-of-systems called MeMSoS, (2) its supporting tool and (3) an illustrative case study of an Aircraft-Emergency-Response-SoS (AERSoS).