Description

The objective of this research proposal is to bring time awareness and evolution into the design of System-of-Systems (SoS), to establish a sound conceptual model, a generic architectural framework and a design methodology including tools for prototyping, for the modeling, development and evolution of time-sensitive SoSes with possible emergent behaviors. Special emphasis is placed on evolution, emergence, dependability (e.g. safety, availability) and security, considering embedded devices and the computing cloud as the execution platform. The concept of evolution will be addressed from two complementary perspectives, considering both long-term evolution and unexpected short-term changes (e.g. failures) in the constituent systems.
The project starts with a study of industrial SoSs in the domains of disaster management, transport, and smart grid applications., where handling of time and evolution aspects will be in the centre of the analysis. The following development of the conceptual model, the architectural framework, the design methodology and some extensions to UML-based tools will form the core of the project work. Instead of using traditional guarantees that were the target for more closed and static systems, the architectural framework will be based on the concept of guaranteed best adaptation under the given constraints, sometimes just monitoring how the environment evolves, and influencing how the SoS takes mitigating actions.
The viability of the framework will be validated on a case study of a Cyber-Physical System, a small smart grid application, where guaranteed responsiveness, evolution, dependability and security are essential requirements. The research is based on the in-depth experience of some of the key researchers of the consortium in the fields of architecture design, real-time systems, dependability, security and the development of large systems-of-systems in such diverse domains as disaster management, the transport sector, and energy distribution.