Modeling Collaborations in Adaptive Systems of Systems

Abstract

The inherent distributed nature of adaptive Systems of Systems (SoS) raises new demands of modeling, understanding, and managing system interactions. Current modeling languages such as general purpose modeling languages or domain specific modeling languages do not aim at the modeling of distributed, adaptive systems together with their interactions, and their influence on each other as first class entities. Former research shows the applicability of explicit feedback loop modeling to achieve a decoupling of the domain logic from the adaptive capabilities of the overall system, but lacks in specifying interactions of distributed feedback loops. In this paper, we introduce the Deurema modeling language, which provides concepts for the specification of collaborations in adaptive SoS between feedback loops. Thereby, we consider collaborations, the exchanged data in form of runtime models, and the adaptation activities inside the systems as first class entities. Furthermore, we show the applicability of our modeling language by describing two state-of-the-art case studies. Therefore, the Deurema modeling language is a first step towards the explicit description of distributed feedback loops between systems of a SoS.