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Abstract:

System-of-systems is the multidisciplinary area that involves system integration as a key to address complex tasks or problems, usually by means of composing multiple independently controlled systems together as part of a large application that often exists only temporarily. This research presents a systematic methodology for the realization of autonomous coordination and self-reconfiguration on cyber-physical systems and system-of-systems, with concrete examples from robotics domain. The research advocates to explicitly split coordination and configuration in system design to improve the reusability of coordination models, and it models systems in a well-structured way using a set of system design patterns to improve the composability, flexibility and reusability of a system, so that an individual system can be easily integrated as a sub-system into system-of-systems with predictable behaviours. The core design drivers behind the patterns are that every system can become part life; meanwhile, any system provides access to its functions via a capabilities software architecture that supports the composability. This research also aims to facilitate educational activities, using the meta model and the software framework developed for cyber-physical system design, to build robots and educational setups, in order to demonstrate, introduce and teach system-of-systems design.