System-of-systems support - A bigraph approach to interoperability and emergent behavior

When designing highly interactive distributed systems such as e-learning environments, a system-of-systems (SoS) perspective enables dynamic adaptation to situations of use and thus user-centeredness during operation. Each system, e.g., a mobile device for accessing a learning management system, can still be operated as a separate system, e.g., displaying the latest feedback from peers, while being run as part of a federated system, e.g., synchronizing a learning group for a tutoring session taking into account individual availability of participants. This type of coupling requires interoperability assurance of systems, in particular federating various devices and cross-over features (e.g., linking learning content to posts on social media platforms) in dynamically evolving environments. We demonstrate the utility of bigraph-based handling of SoS. relationships allow not only the representation of dynamic interaction but also the re-specification of these systems through behavior adaptations. This abstraction supports cross-system decomposition as well as composition of interaction patterns for the purpose of emergent behavior. We show the potential of this approach orchestrating two distributed and independent systems, with orchestration enabling directly respondence to changes in a federated system's context.