An Ontological and Reasoning Approach to System of Systems

Abstract: System-of-Systems (SoS) are all around us and are becoming more common in today’s highly interconnected world. Systems are connected with other systems and have strong dependencies with their operational environments. This leads to an increased level of complexity and risk during product development. A holistic view, and an SoS perspective, is consequently needed in order to develop an early understanding of the available design spaces for new system solutions. This thesis suggests a method that has been developed for this purpose, and to meet the demand for a more holistic product development. Overall, the method consists of two correlated approaches that show how a design space for SoSs can be generated and later processed with, for example, design space reductions. Search and Rescue (SAR) operations have been used as examples of typical SoSs throughout this work and in the development of the presented method. An architecture framework has been used to introduce a standardized and consistent way of understanding the relationships that exist between needs, capabilities and functions. This approach can consequently be used to generate a design space of functions to be performed to meet the overarching needs of an SoS. The second approach has been based on ontology and description logic reasoning. Ontology has here been used to represent an SoS design space with, for example, available SAR assets and their relationships with the operational environment. An SoS representation in an ontology model introduces additional expressiveness and the design space processing capabilities needed for a holistic design process and product development. Based on these results, this thesis and its suggested method and approaches contribute to holistic product development from an SoS perspective.