A self-adaptive system of systems architecture to enable its ad-hoc scalability: Unmanned Vehicle Fleet -- Mission Control Center Case study

This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. The definitive Version of Record was published in the 2023 7th International Conference on Intelligent Systems, Metaheuristics & Swarm Intelligence (ISMSI 2023), https://doi.org/10.1145/3596947.3596949. A System of Systems (SoS) comprises Constituent Systems (CSs) that interact to provide unique capabilities beyond any single CS. A key challenge in SoS is ad-hoc scalability, meaning the system size changes during operation by adding or removing CSs. This research focuses on an Unmanned Vehicle Fleet (UVF) as a practical SoS example, addressing uncertainties like mission changes, range extensions, and UV failures. The proposed solution involves a self-adaptive system that dynamically adjusts UVF architecture, allowing the Mission Control Center (MCC) to scale UVF size automatically based on performance criteria or manually by operator decision. A multi-agent environment and rule management engine were implemented to simulate and verify this approach. INTRODUCTION The System of Systems (SoS) terminology was created through multiple evolutionary steps [14].