An Approach to Facilitate Decision Making on Architecture Evolution Strategies

The evolution of System of Systems (SoS) architectures is a difficult process due to the complex interactions between entities that exist in an SoS. Adequate tools are thus needed in capturing these interdependencies to support informed decisions on architectural evolutions. In this paper, an approach is introduced to facilitate decision making on architecture evolution strategies. The main purpose of evolving architecture is to satisfy advanced capability and performance objectives through adding new systems, replacing existing systems, changing links, etc. The paper employs Colored Petri Nets (CPN), a powerful discrete event dynamic simulation tool, to model, simulate and evaluate the existing and evolving architectures. However, it is unrealistic to improve performance without considering the cost of architecture evolutions. This paper regards complexity as an indicator of the architecture evolving cost. Compared to other complexity metrics, dynamic complexity is included in the complexity metric in this paper. Eventually, an appropriate evolution choice could be achieved by examining the tradeoff space between complexity and performance. This approach is illustrated with a conceptual SoS problem.