Socio-technical analysis of system-of-systems using responsibility modelling
Abstract
Society is challenging systems engineers by demanding increasingly complex and integrated IT systems (Northrop et al., 2006; RAE, 2004) e.g. integrated
enterprise resource planning systems, integrated healthcare systems and business
critical services provisioned using cloud based resources. These types of IT
system are often systems-of-systems (SoS). That is to say they are composed of
multiple systems that are operated and managed by independent parties and are
distributed across multiple organisational boundaries, geographies or legal
jurisdictions (Maier, 1998).
SoS are notorious for becoming problematic due to interconnected technical and
social issues. Practitioners claim that they are ill equipped to deal with the sociotechnical
challenges posed by system-of-systems. One of these challenges is to
identify the socio-technical threats associated with building, operating and
managing systems whose parts are distributed across organisational boundaries.
Another is how to troubleshoot these systems when they exhibit undesirable
behaviour.
This thesis aims to provide a modelling abstraction and an extensible technique
that enables practitioners to identify socio-technical threats prior to
implementation and troubleshoot SoS post-implementation. This thesis evaluates
existing modelling abstractions for their suitability to represent SoS and suggests
that an agent-responsibility based modelling abstraction may provide a practical
and scalable way of representing SoS for socio-technical threat identification and
troubleshooting. The practicality and scalability of the abstraction is explored
through the use of case studies that motivate the extension of existing
responsibility-based techniques so that new classes of system (coalitions-of-systems)
and new classes of threat (agent-related threats) may be analysed.
This thesis concludes that the notion of ‘responsibility’ is a promising abstraction
for representing and analysing systems that are composed of parts that are
independently managed and maintained by agents spanning multiple
organisational boundaries e.g. systems-of-systems, enterprise-scale systems.
Type
Thesis, PhD Doctor of Philosophy
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