Using BPMN and HLA for SoS engineering: lessons learned and future directions

Recently, due to the increasing complexity and wider adoption of heterogeneous Large-Scale systems and System-of-Systems (SoSs), the management of requirements, properties, emergent behaviors, and risks of integrations by coupling existing components, is becoming more and more challenging. Modeling and Simulation (M&S) methodologies and tools can be usefully exploited to address this complexity and support the design of SoSs, so as to allow specialists to perform a more detailed and targeted analysis before the SoSs integration phase. Significant benefits may derive from Distributed Simulation (DS) and the IEEE 1516-2010 - High Level Architecture (HLA), which represents a well-known and widely used DS standard. Unfortunately, the standard does not define a graphical representation through which it is possible to express both the DS and HLA core concepts without ambiguity. To deal with this aspect, the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard represents a feasible solution since it provides a graphical notation based on a flowcharting technique that is used to easily specify business processes in a standard way. This paper presents an integration between the BPMN and HLA standards for engineering SoSs, along with a case study, related lessons learned and future directions.