A Study on Goals Specification for Systems-of-Information Systems: Design Principles and a Conceptual Model

Software-intensive information systems can be aggregated to form Systems-of-Information Systems (SoIS) and provide novel functionalities to achieve high-level goals, also known as missions. Missions represent an important concern in this context since they are related to both capabilities of constituent systems and how they shall interact with each other within a SoIS. Due to such a relevant role, we conducted an exploratory study to evaluate how a state-of-the-art language for mission specification has supported mission (renamed as goal in this study) specification for SoIS. This investigation has been carried out in the context of a space SoIS composed of independent ground information systems, satellites and other systems to provide territory monitoring and environmental data distribution. Results indicate a lack of support for the specificities of SoIS goals, such as the representation of interdependency among activities and dynamicity support. As main contributions, this paper comes up with a set of design principles and a corresponding conceptual model to be followed by languages tailored to support goal specification in SoIS.