Back-SoS: towards a model-based approach to address architectural drift in systems-of-systems

Systems-of-Systems (SoS) encompass independent, heterogeneous software-intensive systems (called constituents) that collaborate among themselves to accomplish larger missions. SoS architectures are inherently dynamic, which causes frequent reconfigurations that can quickly degrade the quality of the SoS architecture, as it can deviate from its initial prescriptive architecture, a phenomenon that has been referred to as architectural drift. Then, it is important to perform a reconciliation, i.e., a propagation of changes in the current concrete architecture to its associated prescriptive architecture, making them synchronized. The main contribution of this paper is proposing Back-SoS, a model-based approach that reconciles descriptive architecture of the SoS with its intended prescriptive architecture, thus supporting the verification of conformance between architectural configurations that can be obtained at runtime and their prescriptive design.