A self-adaptive system of systems architecture to enable its ad-hoc scalability: Unmanned Vehicle Fleet - Mission Control Center Case study

The concept of System of Systems (SoS) refers to a collection of Constituent Systems (CSs) that interact to deliver an emergent behavior that cannot be achieved by any individual CS on its own. The focus of this research is on the ad-hoc scalability of SoS, meaning that the size of the system can change during operation by adding or removing a CS or changing the size of existing CSs. The Unmanned Vehicle Fleet (UVF) is selected as a practical example to showcase the challenge and solution of ad-hoc scalability. UVF has various applications in fields such as search and rescue, intelligent transportation and mobility, but it operates in a dynamic environment that is prone to uncertainties like changing missions, increasing range and capacity, UV failures, and battery requirements. The proposed solution to overcome these uncertainties is a self-adaptive system that can dynamically change the UVF architecture in real-time, allowing for upscaling or downscaling the size of the UVF. The Mission Control Center (MCC) can control this change either through fully-automatic mode based on performance criteria like battery utilization and communication traffic, or through manual mode where the operator makes the decision. A multi-agent environment and rule management engine are implemented to simulate the UVF behavior and validate the proposed solution in both automatic and manual modes.