System of Systems Architecture and Autonomous Robot Swarms: A Long Awaited Junction

Research on the design of autonomous robot swarms has explored many directions over the past ten years (multi-robot systems, coordination protocols, biomimicry, centralized or distributed architecture) but has struggled to combine these different axes in a holistic design approach. The junction between autonomous robot swarm engineering and systems of systems engineering must be pushed further. The first step is to evaluate the contribution of systems of systems architecture to the design of autonomous robot swarms. We propose two initial tests of the relevance of this approach: do the methods and languages of systems of systems architecture allow us to describe the dynamics of these autonomous robot swarms? Do the concepts of system of systems architecture allow us to establish a taxonomy of autonomous robot swarms? This approach should also allow us to test the current limits of the standards of system of systems architecture: taxonomies too focused on the governance of systems of systems, and coexistence without unification of numerous static architecture methods (Model-Based Systems Engineering, Architecture Frameworks, Hypergraphs, etc.) and dynamic architecture methods (Dynamical Systems, System Dynamics, State Machine Diagrams, Event-B modeling, Agent-Based Modeling, BPMN, Activity Diagrams, etc.)