Enhance value by building trustworthy software-reliant system of systems from software product lines

Ever growing and expanding mission-critical domains generate ever emerging and more serious challenges. Complexity which may greatly reduce the trustworthiness of a system is the key reason. Based on the practice of FISCAN in the security inspection domain, we believe a software-reliant system of systems (srSoS) built from software product lines (SPL) is a viable solution to address these issues. In this paper, we present a framework of SPL-to-srSoS to extend SPL practices to srSoS and argue its value-enhancement effects by rapidly meeting increased complexity and emergent behaviors of System of Systems (SoS). The framework employs a basic principle of system hiding, and consists of a SPL-to-srSoS process model and an initially conceived value model. A successfully deployed FISCAN srSoS at Airports provides demonstration for the discussion throughout the paper.