SoSML: Towards an Architectural Description Language for Software-Intensive Systems-of-Systems
Abstract
Systems-of-Systems (SoS) offer innovative services that could not be offered by individual systems. Since SoS often support critical domains, it is imperative to guarantee, still at design-time, their quality. In that sense, models can contribute in such an endeavor, since they can capture the essence of the SoS architecture (structure and behavior) at design-time. However, regular languages available and frequently adopted in software engineering practice do not offer enough semantic expressiveness to precisely capture SoS idiossincrasies. In this direction, this paper discusses the main challenges of SoS modeling and introduces an excerpt of a Architecture Description Language (ADL) for specifying SoS architectures, so-named SoSML (System-of-System Modeling Language). SoSML is a semiformal ADL that is being developed as an extension of the UML, SysML and SoaML.
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