Detecting Emergent Interference in Integration of Multiple Self-Adaptive Systems

Abstract

A system of systems (SoS) is a large-scale concurrent and distributed system whose components are complex systems. An example of SoS is in the domain of self-adaptive systems, where multiple self-adaptive systems must be integrated with each other. As for any other kind of SoS, we face the following question: is there any emergent interference as the result of such integration, which prevents the constituent self-adaptive systems to achieve their goals? Due to the inherent complexity of an SoS, it is not easy to detect emergent interference manually, if possible at all. We study the suitability of formal modeling and verification for detecting emergent interference in an example of SoS, i.e. integration of multiple self-adaptive systems. Model checking reveals that although constituent systems behave correctly when executed individually, they fail to provide correct behavior in an SoS context due to unforeseen interference that emerges.