Event Capture and Compare for Runtime Monitoring of Systems of Systems

Today's complex software systems are highly variable systems of systems (SoS) that evolve continuously to meet new customer requirements or to address technological changes. Despite thorough testing of the different parts of an SoS, the full behavior often emerges during operation only. The systems and their interactions thus need to be continuously monitored and checked during operation to determine compliance with their requirements. In particular, after changes to one system, it is necessary to check whether the overall SoS still behaves correctly and as intended. Based on an existing monitoring framework we are developing support for capturing and comparing event traces in SoS. Our approach facilitates, and partly automates, identifying differences in event traces, which often indicate undesirable behavior introduced during evolution. In this position paper we motivate capture-and-compare support in SoS using an industrial example and present early research results including a prototype.