Towards an architectural patterns language for systems-of-systems

ABSTRACTSystems-of-Systems (SoS) architectures are inherently dynamic; hence, they must support continuous modification in the behaviour and configuration of these systems at runtime as a result of changes in the environment, new SoS missions, and failures or unavailability of constituents. Modifications should occur without affecting the integrity of constituents, the accomplishment of SoS missions, neither their reliability, security, safety, nor other quality attributes. Architecting SoS requires then important investments in human, time, and economic resources, bringing big challenges. Architectural patterns have been widely used to improve software architecture quality, decreasing costs of design and promoting reuse of good practices and well-known solutions. Nowadays, a great amount of architectural patterns is available; most of them are domain-independent, which harness their selection in specific software projects. The main goal of this paper is to contribute to reduce the work of architects during the choice of better architectural patterns for their SoS. For this, we present a set of patterns that are commonly used to construct such architectures. Additionally, benefits of adopting these patterns are described. To demonstrate their feasibility, we present HSH-SoS, a pattern-base architecture for SoS that presents how different patterns can interact to create a solution for SoS. As results, the architectural patterns reported in this work are feasible candidates to compose a language for recurrent problems in SoS architectures. However, formalization of such language is an open issue that we intend to address in future works.