Governance & Autonomy: Towards a Governance-based Analysis of Autonomy in Cyber-Physical Systems-of-Systems

One of the main challenges in integrating Cyber-Physical System-of-Systems (CPSoS) to function as a single integrated system is the autonomy of its CPSs, which may lead conflicts among them due to lack of coordination. We advocate that to efficiently integrate CPSs within the overall context of the CPSoS, we need to adjust the autonomy of some CPSs in a way that enables them to coordinate their activities to avoid any conflict among one another. To achieve that, we need to incorporate the notion of governance within the CPSoS design, which defines rules that can be used for clearly specifying who and how can adjust the autonomy of a CPS. In this paper, we try to tackle this problem by proposing a new conceptual model that can be used for performing a governance-based analysis of autonomy for CPSs within CPSoS. We illustrate the utility of the model with an example from the automotive domain concerning a cooperative driver overtaking assistance system.