High-level Communication in Systems-of-Systems

Communication between machines resides usually on a low level of abstraction that is hard to understand for most humans. Human factors or communication between humans and machines have not yet received sufficient attention in systems engineering. All this poses serious problems for communication especially in Systems-of-Systems. Therefore, we propose high-level communication based on communicative acts both for machine-machine and for human-machine communication. Such an approach to human-like communication allows us even to unify machine-machine and human-machine interaction. This unification enables scenarios where a machine initiates a communication, without having to know whether the partners are machines or humans.