Processing Chains in System of Systems

SOA has been seen as one of the main approaches for managing "system of systems" (SoS) i.e. Large scale IT landscapes. The extension of SOA to include the concept of process orientation could be the next evolutionary step for SOA. Before starting to define reference architectures for process-oriented SOA in SoS it would be advantageous to learn more about the current state of process handling in a SoS. The objective of the current paper is to describe the different approaches to implementing processes in a SoS. The term processing chain is introduced as an abstract representation of processes in SoS. A classification of processing chains is defined and an approximate distribution of different "processing chains" is presented in a case study based on the analyzed SoS. Also, the paper addresses the question which processing chain type would be appropriate in a certain context based on the underlying requirements.