Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Software Engineering for Systems-of-Systems

Abstract

These are the proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Software Engineering for Systemsof- Systems (SESoS 2016). After three successful previous editions, two of them co-located with ECSA, the European Conference of Software Architecture, we are now proud to present the second edition colocated with ICSE, the International Conference on Software Engineering, which is currently in its 38th edition as the premier worldwide conference for software engineering research. This is also the first edition to leave Europe, after the first edition in Montpellier, France (July 2013, colocated with ECOOP and ECMFA alongside with ECSA), the second in Vienna, Austria (August 2014), and the third in Florence, Italy (May 2015, the first ICSE edition). This edition, as ICSE itself, will be held in Austin, Texas, United States, on May 16, 2016. Systems-of-Systems (SoS) have become increasingly complex and are frequently used in highly distributed, dynamic, and open environments. SoS have emerged as a new class of evolving software systems, where their constituents (systems themselves in their own right) work cooperatively in order to fulfil specific missions. It has already been established that SoS are characterized by managerial and operational independence, geographic distribution, evolutionary development, and the creation of emergent behavior. These characteristics have raised substantial challenges to software engineering researchers and practitioners. Therefore, SoS are becoming ever more important both for industry and academia. SoS are increasingly involved in applications that address societal needs such as environmental monitoring, distributed energy grids management, emergency coordination and crisis management, global traffic control, and smart cities. Software engineering theories and tools are needed to adequately design, implement, operate, and even evolve such dynamic, complex software-intensive SoS. This workshop series has been the first one to address this new perspective specifically. The main goal of SESoS is to provide a forum for software engineering researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas and experiences, analyze research and development issues, discuss promising solutions, and propose visions for the future. The fourth edition of the workshop focuses on discussing and establishing the foundations (models and architecture) for the SoS Software Engineering domain, to pave the way for a more structured community effort.