SysML modeling of service-oriented system-of-systems

Abstract The success of the ongoing fourth industrial revolution largely depends on our ways to cope with the novel design challenges arising from a combination of an enormous increase in process and product complexity, as well as the expected autonomy and self-organization of complex and diverse industrial hardware–software installments, often called systems-of-systems. In this paper, we employ the service-oriented architectural paradigm, as materialized in the Eclipse Arrowhead framework, to represent modern systems engineering principles and their open structural principles and, thus, relevance to flexible and adaptive systems. As for adequately capturing the structural aspect, we propose using model-based engineering techniques and, in particular, a SysML-based specialization of systems modeling. The approach is illustrated by a real-life use-case in industrial automation.