OntoSoS.CM: A business process architecture driven and semantically enriched change management framework for systems of systems engineering

The emergence of Systems of Systems (SoS) arrangements, with their high level of complexity, mainly due to the different characteristics of the individual systems and their integration into the respective SoS, has brought about new challenges in terms of Configuration Management (CM) in general, and change management in particular. Novel change management frameworks are needed to appropriately address these challenges simultaneously both at the level of individual systems and at the SoS level. To address these challenges, there has been a call for a major paradigm shift, by proposing state-of-the-art approaches that target the investigation of new frameworks, which align various CM activities with newly proposed Systems Engineering (SE) models (i.e. SoSE models). So far, the adopted change management frameworks have been applied for managing changes to software and IT services in complex monolithic system environments only, but they have not been widely proposed to be applied on entire SoS arrangements. This paper introduces an ongoing research that aims to propose a novel approach, by investigating the potential of using ontology-driven models combined with a formal Business Process Architecture (BPA) approach and in particular, Riva, in driving the development of a generic semantically enriched change management framework for the software engineering life cycle of SoS, namely the OntoSoS.CM framework.