Using hybrid SoSE approaches for modeling and validating large scale Service Oriented Architecture ( SOA ) System of Systems as next-generation global military informatics platforms with Colored Petri Nets ( CPN ) and Extend / MESA

Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are rapidly becoming an accepted means for network information exchange across heterogeneous fabrics of nodes. In architecture, an SOA is a system of systems (SoS) with complex interactions. Owing to SOA benefits of flexibility, interoperability, loose coupling, and reusability, the Department of Defense (DoD) has a future SOA framework for defense applications known as Net-Centric Enterprise Solutions for Interoperability (NESI). This paper details the modeling effort of a Multi-Channel Service Oriented Architecture (MCSOA), an enhanced SOA for DoD’s requirements. MCSOA’s Discovery protocol enables location transparency, availability awareness, service guarantees, context-based routing, and fault-tolerance. To handle MCSOA’s complexities we adopted hybrid modeling, using Colored Petri Nets for the internal structure and interactions, and Extend/MESA for data exchanges at the network level. Reliable Extend/MESA models need error-free internal interactions, which we validate in the underlying CPN model, The paper contains a brief description of our models and validation results.