Context-based ontology to describe System-of-Systems Interoperability

The concept of System-of-Systems (SoS) presents a high level perspective that explains the interactions between independent subsystems. In the context of SoS, the issue of interoperability is crucial especially when integrating multiple heterogeneous and independently governed systems. Any solution is naturally applied to resolve a problem in a precise context, where context specificities are implicitly or explicitly processed. In the scope of this paper, we tackle the problem of SoS interoperability knowledge description taking into account the notion of context. To structure this description, we propose ontology design patterns (ODPs) that describe the notion of “context” in the field of SoS Interoperability. These ODPs was defined based on a Foundational Ontology (FO) for “Context” description. An example in the field of Traffic management is given to illustrate the practical usefulness of the proposed ontology.

I. Introduction

The SoS concept presents a high level perspective that explains the interactions between the independent subsystems. A System of Systems is any system that is a relatively large and complex, dynamically evolving, and physically distributed system of pre-existing, heterogeneous, autonomous, and independently governed systems, whereby the system of systems exhibits significant amounts of unexpected emergent behavior and characteristics [1]. Thus, there is a growing interest for the creation of synergies between these pre-existing, heterogeneous, autonomous, and independently governed systems to achieve the desired performance of the overall system (SoS). Given this definition, the issue of interoperability presents and is considered as the most challenging problems in the SoS engineering (SoSE) community [2].