Developing dependable software for a system-of-systems

Abstract

Capturing and realizing the desired system-of-systems behavior in the traditional natural language development documents is a complex issue given that the legacy systems in a system-of-systems exhibit independent behaviors. As a result of a development strategy of interconnecting systems, the emergent behavior of the system-of-systems cannot be predicted. In our consideration of dependable software for a system-of-systems, we used our case study of the Ballistic Missile Defense System to study the development of architectural views, distributed-system and real-time design considerations, components, contract interfaces, and the application of formal methods in system-of-systems specifications. We developed a prototype of a battle manager and demonstrated a slice of the formal model of the battle manager. Given the technical contributions of this research, we conclude that it is possible to develop an architecture from which we can reason about the controlling software for a system-of-systems. Furthermore, we can realize the controlling software for a system-of-systems through the concepts of component-based software engineering. Finally, we can apply formal methods in the design and development of the controlling software for a system-of-systems by specifying the requirements for the software components with assertions and employing a runtime-verification tool to verify the desired behavior as specified by the assertions.