A Requirements Monitoring Infrastructure for Systems of Systems

An increasing number of software systems today are systems of systems (SoS) that have been developed by diverse teams over many years. Such systems emerge gradually and it is hard to analyze or predict their behavior due to their scale, complexity, and heterogeneity. In particular, certain behavior only emerges at runtime due to complex interactions between the involved systems and their environment. Requirements monitoring has been proposed as a solution for checking at runtime whether systems adhere to their requirements. However, existing requirements monitoring approaches have been designed for single systems and therefore do not adequately consider the characteristics of SoS. More specifically, requirements in SoS exist at different levels, across different systems, and are owned by diverse stakeholders. Furthermore, requirements monitoring for SoS has to be flexible with respect to technologies and architectural patterns. This thesis will identify the capabilities required for requirements monitoring of SoS. It will further provide a flexible and tailorable infrastructure to support engineers and maintenance staff in observing and analyzing the behavior of a SoS at runtime. We plan to evaluate our work by assessing its usefulness in the context of an industrial SoS.