A Holistic Viewpoint-Based SysML Profile to Design Systems-of-Systems

In recent decades more and more efforts have been devoted in supporting the design of Systems-of-Systems (SoSs). These systems are composed of autonomous Constituent Systems (CSs) which are integrated together to achieve a higher level goal that cannot be achieved by any of its CSs in isolation. Designing such an SoS is a multidisciplinary problem which involves considering emergent phenomena, assuring the achievement of dependability and security requirements, guaranteeing system responsiveness, supporting dynamicity and evolution and multi-criticality of provided services. We believe that a first step towards a viable design approach is to provide a conceptual model of SoSs which captures SoS concepts (e.g., methods, characteristics, and technologies related to SoSs) and their inter-relationships. Such a conceptual model should enhance the understandability of SoSs to stakeholders and provide the basis for further automated analysis. In this context, the AMADEOS European project is bringing together researchers and practitioners to provide the support to design SoSs starting from the definition of a domain specific ontology serving as a vocabulary for SoSs. Our contribution consists of semi-formalizing the key SoS concepts and relationships defined in AMADEOS adopting a SysML visual modeling language. We propose a SysML profile for SoSs and we show its applicability in a Smart Grid scenario.