Introducing Meta-Requirements for Describing System of Systems

Abstract

Complex, evolutionary systems operating in an open world can be seen as a composition of components which interact each other in order to fulfill their requirements. Following this vision, Systems of Systems (SoSs) literature aims at supporting the life of such complex systems taking into account key viewpoints such as emergence, time, mobility, evolution, dynamicity. Although different attempts can be found in the literature to address mostly specific viewpoints separately, it is still missing a unifying approach to analyze the whole set of viewpoints and their relationships, based on the identification of meta-requirements that can be exploited to describe any System of Systems (SoS). To this end, we developed a unifying meta-requirements model to describe SoSs viewpoints and relate them. The model is meant to be used to support the derivation of the requirements for any SoS. This paper introduces the problem, and presents the main notions of the meta-requirements model with the support of a domain-specific scenario.