Keynote: From embedded systems to systems of systems

Abstract

Summary form only given, as follows. Most of today?s machines, e.g., automotive engines, production machinery or even consumer devices, such as a washing machine, are controlled by an embedded computer system. It is assumed that the widespread integration of these existing embedded computer systems and data bases into systems-ofsystems (e.g., the Internet of Things, IoT) will provide new synergistic services, make better use of the available information, lead to new insights, improve current economic processes and thus create greater wealth. Fueled by the dramatic technological progress in the area of wire-bound and wire-less communication, this integration is already happening on a wide scale in industry. From the viewpoint of computer science, the domain of Systems-of-Systems (SoS) is a relatively new field that poses significant new research challenges. In our view, the differentiating characteristics of a SoS compared to a monolithic system are the autonomy of the Constituent Systems (CS), emergent phenomena at the SoS level, uncoordinated evolution of the CSs and most, importantly, that the occurrence of faults in the CSs must be considered normal during the operation an SoS. This presentation will focus on the issues that are posed by the integration of embedded systems into systems of systems and will refer to the research approach taken in the European AMADEOS project 610535 (Architecture for Multi-criticality Agile Dependable Evolutionary Open System-of-Systems). The complete presentations were not made available for publication as part of the conference proceedings.