Information Systems: Towards a System of Information Systems

This article describes the emerging roles of the systems engineering (SE) function in supporting enterprise management in information‐intensive organizations. “Enterprise Systems Engineering” (ESE) comprises three major roles or “levels” of systems engineering for successful and efficient development or procurement of large complex systems of systems (SoS). While the authors' experience focuses predominantly on government organizations acting as their own SoS integrators, the SoS ESE concept has generic applicability for any organization, public or private, seeking to attain competitive advantage through leveraging of information technology resources and systems. The processes and tools described here have been developed and successfully employed to facilitate government project management and investment decisions and control. [Carlock and Decker, 1998] This paper describes a formal three‐level SoS ESE process that, at the top level, organizes and maintains all of the details of the enterprise‐wide SoS architecture and strategic development plan in a flexible framework that accommodates the changes expected over a long SoS evolution. The information maintained in this framework allows the organization to know where it is going, how and when it is going to get there, the required capabilities and interfaces of each SoS component, and the impact of changes to system requirements, budgets, schedules, etc., on the overall SoS. The middle level processes allow the organization to perform trade studies among alternative solutions to implement required capabilities based on what is best for the enterprise‐wide SoS rather than just local considerations. The end result of the middle level processes is a selected and approved solution and its associated cost, schedule, benefits, and technical baselines. The third level processes implement the approved solutions in accordance with the approved baselines. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Syst Eng 4: 242–261, 2001

With the growing advances in computing and communications technologies, the concept of system-of-systems (SoS) becomes widely recognized as it offers potential benefits and new challenges. Relevant perspectives related to SoS constitutes nowadays an active domain of research, among them those issues concerning the need of full interoperation. When it is related to enterprise information systems, the SoS paradigm may then be derived to a form of System-of-Information Systems (SoIS). This paper presents an overview of the features of the interoperation in SoIS and proposes guidelines to evaluate and formalize it in order to identify semantic gaps between information systems concepts and models. It provides, through an example, an approach to use Description Logic for evaluating semantic interoperability concerns.KeywordsSystem-of-SystemsInformation SystemsSemantic InteroperabilityDescription LogicOntology

Systems of Systems (SoS) modeling is becoming increasingly important in both civilian and military systems. The Department of Defense (DoD) Defense Acquisition Guidebook, [1] defines a SoS as a “set or arrangement of systems that results when independent and useful systems are integrated into a larger system that delivers unique capabilities.” Organizations are changing their emphasis from “We need a new system” to “We need to achieve a specific outcome.” As these outcomes become more complex and the associated systems more complex, the management, modeling and simulation of these SoS becomes equally challenging. Often, the SoS is modeled in all its complexity, often at a single level of abstraction or level of detail. Instead of a “megamodel” approach, a standards-based “model of models” approach is what is necessary. This approach will use the Object Management Group (OMG) Unified Profile for DoDAF and MODAF (UPDM) for modeling enterprise architectures from capabilities to detailed components, and the Reusable Asset Specification (RAS) for defining reusable assets. Combining UPDM and RAS provides a Model of Models approach with the main model specifying assets in various levels of details. The models specified by these assets can be referenced when detailed analysis is required, or hidden when a SoS viewpoint is required, allowing the analyst to see the forest through the trees. The paper will also include an assessment of the applicability and effectiveness of this approach. The International Conference on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) System of Systems Working Group (SoSWG) has collected a set of “Pain Points on SoS” from a variety of international sources. This paper will review these pain points and discuss how the application of a Model of Model approach, combined with standards-based modeling tools and a reusable assets approach can help to alleviate some of the pain currently being felt by SoS architects and managers. Hopefully, this response to their SOS will deliver some much-needed assistance.

A System of Systems (SoS) is an arrangement of useful and independent sub-systems, which are integrated into a larger system. Examples are found in transport systems, nutritional systems, smart homes and smart cities. The composition of component sub-systems into an SoS enables support for complex functionalities that cannot be provided by individual sub-systems on their own. However, to realize the benefits of these functionalities it is necessary to address several software engineering chal-lenges including, but not limited to, the specification, design, construction, deployment, and management of an SoS. The various component sub-systems in an SoS environment are often concerned with distinct domains; are developed by different stake-holders under different circumstances and time; provide distinct functionalities; and are used by different stakeholders, which allow for the existence of conflicting requirements. In this paper, we present a framework to support management of emerging conflicting requirements in an SoS. In particular, we describe an approach to support identification of conflicts between resource-based requirements (i.e. requirements concerned with the con-sumption of different resources). In order to illustrate and evaluate the work, we use an example of a pilot study of an IoT SoS ecosystem designed to support food security at different levels of granularity, namely individuals, groups, cities, and nations.

Recently, new Information Systems are being introduced to users on regular basis. At a certain point, users might deal with several systems producing overwhelming amount of information and resources. This is challenging on many levels, as the user has to look for information and resources in different Information Systems. One of the most important challenges here is the way to manage the resources produced from those systems. Another important one is to produce knowledge from these resources and provide support for decision making process. This also applies to complex systems such as System of Information Systems (SoIS). Thus, we aim to investigate resources management and decision support in a System of Information Systems (SoIS). We plan to address this issue by introducing an architectural model of SoIS. This model will provide guidance to build a first prototype. The SoIS operates as a single entry point for several Information Systems granting the user access to information and resources produced from multiple Information Systems. It also provide the ability to track users' activities to create an added value not possible to maintain when those systems were operating separately. Furthermore, this encompassing solution is possible by introducing a knowledge base as a leader system to the orchestration of SoIS. This knowledge base can take the role for storing, organizing, and sharing resources from different Information Systems. Thus, provide the link between resources present in different systems and facilitate resources management and decision making in a System of Information Systems.

System of systems (SoS) is an emerging field in the design and development of complex systems that are built from large scale component systems. A SoS has the following attributes: operational and managerial independence of components, a geographic extent that limits control mechanisms to information exchange, an evolutionary nature, and emergent behavior. The subsystems that comprise the SoS often are built by different organizations with conflicting goals, designed under different assumptions and built to different quality standards. These factors impact fault detection, fault isolation, and fault tolerance and can result in systems that cannot easily be debugged, integrated, or maintained. When fault detection and fault tolerance are deficient, the system may behave in a fragile or brittle manner, randomly and repeatedly crashing. Crashes prevent automated diagnosis algorithms from being executed and can prevent manual root cause analysis by erasing system state. Fragility during system integration can prevent achieving schedule milestones and deadlines. Deficient fault detection and fault isolation also impacts end users and system maintainers. (Think <insert name of infamous project here>).From the system architect's point of view, designing a system that can detect all possible fault conditions across all components can be an extremely difficult, if not impossible challenge. Can any system be trusted to diagnose or repair itself when it has been corrupted by faults? How do you prevent local faults from growing into global failures? The end users may have unreasonable expectations about how the system should behave when components within the SoS behave abnormally or fail. They may expect better behavior than the typical PC. The system maintainers may expect a coherent systems view of failures to isolate faulted components and to provide an orderly and safe shutdown or recovery.(Think power grid blackouts, Telecomm failures, etc.)The most beneficial way to achieve fault tolerance is to design in fault detection and fault reporting such that defined boundaries such as subsystems serve as natural firewalls for fault containment. Although partitioning the system into subsystems for fault containment is well known and practiced, the end result as experienced at the time of system integration is rarely a success. COTS middleware, intended to aid distributed design often becomes in effect a step backwards by providing fertile ground for faults and failures that breach fault containment boundaries. (Think <insert name of OS or middleware vendor here>)What can be done to improve this situation? This paper addresses the system architectural partitioning concept of the Coordinated Atomic Actions (CAA). CAA promotes a different manner of organizing software architecture that improves fault containment across potentially faulty components. CAA was first invented by members of Brian Randell's research group at the University of Newcastle at Tyne in the mid 1990's. CAA promotes the concept of the "transaction" which has been traditionally identified with database applications. When you access your bank account via ATM, you are exercising database transactions within your bank's financial SoS. CAA applies transactions to cooperating concurrent distributed processes, which are the basis for most large complex computing systems.

A System of Systems (SoS) is a large complex system, with varying degrees of operational independence, managerial independence, evolutionary development, geographical distribution and lifecycle independence. Critical Infrastructure such as the electrical grid contains all the aspects of a SoS. Due to the ever‐increasing complexity of the grid, a single model encompassing all aspects of the grid would be impossible. Hence, we need to abstract the problem into a SoS set of aspects and examine the system both at the SoS level, as well as the detailed level. This will require the use of standardized systems modeling tools such as the Systems Modeling Language (SysML), and the Unified Architecture Framework (UAF) to define the overall goals, strategies, capabilities, interactions, standards, operational and system architecture, system patterns and so forth. This paper will examine the electrical grid as a SoS, define common characteristics, identify issues and vulnerabilities and MBSE strategies for addressing them.

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Product service systems (PSS) can be understood as an innovation / business strategy that includes a set of products and services that are realized by an actor network. More recently, PSS that comprise System of Systems (SoS) have been of increasing interest, notably in the transportation (autonomous vehicle infrastructures, multi-modal transportation) and energy sector (smart grids). Architecting such PSS-SoS goes beyond classic SoS engineering, as they are often driven by new technology, without an a priori client and actor network, and thus, a much larger number of potential architectures. However, it seems that neither the existing PSS nor SoS literature provides solutions to how to architect such PSS. This paper presents a methodology for architecting PSS-SoS that are driven by technological innovation. The objective is to design PSS-SoS architectures together with their value proposition and business model from an initial technology impact assessment. For this purpose, we adapt approaches from the strategic management, business modeling, PSS and SoS architecting literature. We illustrate the methodology by applying it to the case of an automobile PSS.

As an extended cloud solution, the cloud federation is designed to address the highly increasing complexity of business needs by providing capabilities on demand, at a better service level agreement (SLA). In fact, Cloud federation could not only be an appropriate way for managing the intensive-resource requirements but also it may be a powerful coordination environment for meeting complex business needs by easily integrating different distributed SaaS systems. Building a SaaS system that could satisfy a more complex need, upon existing ones deployed in a federated cloud environment could be treated as a System of Systems (SoS). The individual SaaS systems behave independently and, cooperate with each other to emerge a new resulting behavior. Thus, building an overall SaaS system from a set of distributed SaaS systems, deployed on heterogeneous cloud environments may increase the overall delivery costs. In this paper, we focus on how building a large SaaS system from a set of existing ones, while maximizing the desirable resulting behavior and minimizing the total delivery costs. Thus, we propose a cost-efficient composition approach for building a federated cloud-based SoS, by considering both the functional and non-functional requirements to obtain the best composition in terms of delivery costs. We implement an agent based SoS composition simulator providing composition scenarios and their related QoS and evaluating the different special cloud criterion that can influence the overall SoS delivery cost.

In the 90s there was introduced concept of system of systems (SoS) in order to deal with growing complexity, geographical distribution, and heterogeneity of the various technological systems such as, for instance, modern factories. Methods of the traditional system engineering have been challenged in capturing of SoS specific nature like evolving requirements, ambulatory boundaries, decentralization, and other. In order to analyze, simulate and modify such kind of systems, there should be developed modeling methods and tools which would be capable to encompass the SoS specific properties. The aim of this work was to propose a computational method to model SoS, which could be further applied to the description and simulation of the highly distributed, heterogeneous, and networked production systems of the future. It was concluded that the proposed approach is able to provide the static and dynamic descriptions of the SoS-components and the communication between them in detailed yet relatively simple mode. For further maturing of the approach and with order to prove the applicability of the method proposed, next steps will be implemented: the method will be tested on a tesbed of a production line, and then a modeling of a real use case from the domain of manufacturing is preplanned.

Systems-of-Systems (SoS) refer to large, complex, and software-intensive systems, resulted from the interoperability among heterogeneous, independent constituent systems. The main purpose of SoS is to perform tasks that could not be achieved by these constituents separately; besides, unique SoS characteristics impose new challenges to their development processes. We conducted a Systematic Mapping to identify initiatives, trends, and challenges in the SoS development and, as a result, 32 initiatives were identified. We also evaluated these initiatives with regard to the adherence to the technical processes of IEEE/ISO/IEC 15288:2015 and to the software implementation essential processes of IEEE/ISO/IEC 12207:2008. In general, these initiatives emphasize artifacts in the early stages of the development processes, addressing mainly requirements and architecture. Moreover, 17 of them emphasize the testing activity. We also summarized the SoS characteristics addressed in the studies and discuss the main trends and challenges.

This paper describes a System of Information Systems (SoIS) to capitalize heterogeneous resources of collaborative activities in perspective of strategic analysis. The de-centralization of work processes have led organizations to respond to their dynamic environments and nomads practices by using collaborative software such as brainstorming environment. The outputs of a brainstorming are huge amounts of knowledge that need to be shared, capitalized and structured to generate a support for new discussions. While preparing, or during a brainstorming, participants may use other systems/web tools to gather more information. This information are external resources that improve the brainstorming efficiency and have to be capitalized in the same way as the knowledge produced during the brainstorming to “re-invent” the way of strategic analysis. It is therefore a matter of managing a set of resources generated by a set of independent systems. For this, we propose a solution based on SoIS approach. More precisely, we propose a solution to integrate a collaborative application called ECOPACK within a large SoIS called MEMORAeSoIS. ECOPACK is a digital ecosystem that meets the needs of ideation, innovation and strategic analysis. It offers several functionalities such as the capitalization of resources produced during a meeting. However, as mentioned above, participants may use resources coming from other systems. To allow capitalizing external resources, we use the MEMORAeSoIS that provides the ability to manage resources of autonomous systems. We illustrate our proposition by a scenario on the challenges of France's naval defense. This paper provides a solution based on the System of Information Systems approach to capitalize collaborative activities.

Large software-intensive systems have emerged in several application domains, such as healthcare, transportation, smart environments, and Industry 4.0. Sometimes referred to as Systems-of-Systems (SoS) and resulted from the integration of various heterogeneous and independent software systems, such large systems lead to high dynamism and often operate in critical and uncertain environments. Hence, the reliability of these systems must be a concern, but traditional reliability approaches fail to cope with such high dynamism and uncertainty. Thus, new solutions are required to ensure the reliability of SoS. Moreover, there is a lack of studies that investigate the reliability of SoS. This paper presents the state of the art of the way that the reliability of SoS has been addressed. After investigating the literature, we selected 27 studies to perform a detailed analysis regarding factors that affect the reliability of SoS and approaches and metrics to improve it. We found an area still gaining maturity with researchers working in isolation and mainly developing solutions for domain-specific problems. There are still various critical open issues, while SoS have been increasingly adopted as a suitable and integrated solution in critical domains.

Effective information and knowledge management is vital in many areas, including higher education. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, especially the long short-term memory (LSTM) information system performance patterns in the educational world. This article explores the application of LSTM to optimize knowledge management in colleges, focusing on the prediction of information systems performance. The proposed methods include text classification steps, with measures such as data collection, data pre-processing, word representation, classification, and evaluation. The test results showed that the LSTM model managed to classify reviews labeled positive, neutral, and negative with an accuracy of 33.33%. However, the success of the model was limited by the size of the data set and the pre-processing involved. This research recommends further development with the addition of experimental data, proper preprocessing adjustments, and better hyperparameter identification to improve the accuracy of the prediction results. Keywords: information management, artificial intelegence, LSTM, text classification, knowledge management, accurate prediction