A Methodology for Designing System-of-System Architecture based on Emergent Behaviour obtained from Business Process
A system-of-systems (SoS) is a class of system that is characterized by the union of independently operated and managed systems that do new and valuable things when together. Each constituent of an SoS contributes with their specific functionalities to build new behaviors that could not be performed by any of these constituents in isolation, these behaviors are known as emergent behavior. Because of the complex nature of this class of systems, as new constituents join or leave the SoS, unexpected emergent behaviors can appear making modeling and simulation a significant role in the development of these systems. Business processes are widely adopted in organizations to improve agility and decision making. In many cases, the activities present in a business process are carried out through systems. This research raises the following hypothesis if a business process activity cannot be carried out by a single system, so there must be configurations of systems-of-systems with emergent behaviors capable of complete this activity. Therefore, the main goal of this research is to propose an architectural process of systems-of-systems that present emerging behaviors that meet business requirements. In this sense, data mining approaches will be applied to find existing systems (according to their characteristics and functionalities) that can be part of the SoS. Thus, this research intends to develop and evaluate methodologies to architect systems-of-systems, apply data mining approaches to identify systems that have relevant functionality to cooperate with SoS, algorithms for integration of constituents into SoS and, consequently, ways of producing simulations to verify whether the proposed approach is consistent with the research hypothesis raised.