Evaluation of Systems-of-Systems Software Architectures: State of the Art and Future Perspectives

• Published in: ACM computing surveys 2022-11, Vol.55 (4), p.1-35, Article 67
• Main Authors: Santos, Daniel S., Oliveira, Brauner R. N., Kazman, Rick, Nakagawa, Elisa Y.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Complex systems; Computer architecture; Computer science; Domains; Evaluation; Quality management; Software and its engineering; Software architectures; Software verification and validation; Ultra-large-scale systems
• ISSN: 0360-0300; 1557-7341
• DOI: 10.1145/3519020

The quality of large and complex Systems-of-Systems (SoS) that have emerged in critical application domains depends on the quality of their architectures, which are inherently dynamic in terms of reorganization at runtime to comply with domain needs. However, the way to model and evaluate the quality of these architectures is not clear. This article presents the state-of-the-art regarding how SoS architectures have been evaluated. For this, we systematically examined the literature and, as a result, we discovered and summarized relevant architectural evaluation methods and associated modeling techniques and quality attributes, the maturity of these methods, as well as the benefits and costs of adopting them. We also address open issues and research opportunities and recommend that the mindset for SoS architecture evaluation must be changed to ensure the quality of SoS in critical domains.