Architectural Evaluation of Systems-of-systems

Historical Document Review

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1.0 01/28/14 Initial document.

Jaguaraci Silva

1. Contextualization

Disasters occurring during large-scale events and in industrial areas may have a huge

impact on human lives, property, and the environment. Fast reaction is vital in order to

avoid physical damages as well as damages to the public image of the involved

organizations. As a result several measures are taken and periodically bolstered to ensure

effective and efficient emergency and crisis management. The use of a software system

is among those measures, together with staff assignments to a command center, trainings,

and (virtual) simulation exercises.

The main challenge for a command center is to quickly obtain contextual information

about the emergency situation in order to make the right decisions. Late decisions or

decisions based on inaccurate information have a great potential for causing more

damages. As mobile devices are widely used and in many cases connected to the Internet,

crowdsourcing information and mobile technologies offer great potential for addressing

this challenge. However, existing crowdsourcing information based platforms for

emergency and crisis management present several shortcomings. In particular and more

importantly, they are neither tailored for use in mobile devices nor for use close to the

place of an incident, when people are still under stress. Moreover, there is a lack of

resources for automatic analysis of the collected multimedia data.

RESCUER aims at developing a smart and interoperable computer platform for using

crowdsourcing information mashed up with open data to support emergency and crisis

management. Thus, the RESCUER platform will be capable of:

1) Gathering crowdsourcing information in real-time by providing user interaction

mechanisms

especially developed to be used in emergency situations;

2) Greatly improving situational awareness in a command center in a timely manner,

through novel multimedia data analysis methods and effective visualization and

manipulation mechanisms; and

3) Semi-automatically providing official and accurate announcement of emergencies to

the affected community and general public through an efficient approach for deriving

specific documents from generic ones. Furthermore, RESCUER will support ad-hoc

communication.

Both European and Brazilian industries will benefit from the project results, several of

which have the potential for becoming at least de facto standards. As industrial areas

periodically simulate incidents for training purposes, the RESCUER platform can be,

experimentally, validated before the Olympic Summer Games in 2016. In this context,

this project plan aims at provide a process quality model to support the Rescuer platform

by means of its package five, where the evaluation objectives, stakeholders and systems

are described below.

2. Objective

The main objectives of this work are:

(i) ensure the quality characteristics of RESCUER systems and its integration;

(ii) support the measuring of each development phase, before and after to apply

the architectural evaluation;

(iii) contribute to identify system architecture issues; and

(iv) avoid architectural pitfalls on software development process;

The architecture evaluation will build a relationship between the system elements and

quality metrics. It have assumed the RESCUER evaluation tasks (WP5) can be associated

to several ISO/IEC 9126 quality characteristics and elements of Systems-of-systems. In

this aspect, it is believed that the reference architecture taxonomy for systems elements

(Nakagawa et al, 2012) can be fit to Systems-of-systems proposals (DeLaurentis et al.,

2005), specially to the RESCUER platform, that having Systems-of-systems

characteristics (DeLaurentis et al, 2005; Jamshidi, 2009; Maier, 1998).

In this sense, this proposal also will investigate and building a Systems-of-system

taxonomy using a Systematic Literature Review (Kitchenham, 2004) avoiding a wrong

taxonomy that will not fulfill the RESCUER evaluation objectives.

In order to establish the architectural evaluation for Systems-of-systems, this proposal

will be conducted in six main steps:

Step 1: Identification of related elements by using contexts, goals, projects, stakeholders,

interests, and software artifacts by means of a tailoring process.

Step 2: Identification of quality characteristics using the ISO/IEC 9126 standard.

Step 3: Identification of Systems-of-systems elements that could be contained in Step 1.

Step 4: Identification of a set of questions related to each objective, goal and metric to

evaluation contained in using context.

Step 5: Building of a dynamic model to architectural evaluation by: using contexts, goals,

projects, stakeholders, interests, etc... By select these criteria on an assessment interface.

Step 6: Perform the evaluation using the artifacts and the generated model.

3. Justification

The work package 5 aims at evaluating the results of WP2 (Mobile Crowdsourcing

Solution), WP3 (Data Analysis Solutions), and WP4 (Emergency Response Toolkit)

taking into consideration the requirements defined in Task 1.1 (Requirements

Engineering). A main issue is the need for orchestrating the evaluation of the several

components in the three iterations of the project, so that the project can achieve its

expected results are at the end. This will be addressed in Task 5.1, where an evaluation

model and a general evaluation plan will be created. All subsequent tasks (Task 5.2, Task

5.3, and Task 5.4) will follow the same pattern: a specific evaluation plan will be defined

based on the specifications of the general evaluation plan at the beginning of each

iteration. In this specific evaluation plan, applicable evaluation goals will be structured

according to the GQM approach in order to derive evaluation criteria. In addition, the

specific evaluation plan will determine the evaluation scenario (if not done yet), the

evaluation method, and the profile for recruiting participants to perform the evaluation.

Evaluation reports will state the quality of the current project results and the potential for

improvement in the next iteration. As the project will support emergency and crisis

management in emergencies occurring in large-scale events and in industrial areas, these

two underlying scenarios must be considered in the general evaluation plan and in the

specific evaluation plans. Another aspect to be addressed in this work package is the need

to at least simulate stressful situations in a close-to-real emergency context in order to

properly evaluate the project results.

References

DeLaurentis, D. and W. Crossley. "A Taxonomy-Based Perspective for System of

Systems Design Methods," Paper 925, IEEE 2005 Conference on Systems, Man, and

Cybernetics, Waikoba, HI, Oct. 10-12, 2005.

Nakagawa, E. Y., Oquendo, F., and Becker, M. RAModel: A reference model for reference

architectures. In WICSA/ECSA, pages 297–301. IEEE Computer Society, 2012.

Jamshidi, M. Systems of Systems Engineering - Principles and Applications. Boca Raton,

FL, USA: CRC Press, 2009.

Kitchenham, Barbara. Procedures for performing systematic reviews. Technical Report TR/SE-

0401 and NICTA Technical Report 0400011T.1, Keele University and National ICT Australia

Ltd, Jul 2004.

Maier, M.W. "Architecting Principles for Systems-of-Systems." Systems Engineering,

1998.