Table 1 Relationship among properties (P), quality attributes, architectural patterns and styles, and mediation categories in SoS

P1—continuous accommodation or integration of constituent systems.

Cooperation, integration, interoperability (i.e., technical, semantic, and syntactic), portability, and flexibility of constituents, and low-coupling between constituents and the SoS

Centralized architecture, publish-subscribe, contract monitoring, ESB, trickle-up, pace layering, MAPE-K, share data, broker, and observer-controller

Communication and conversion

P2—assurance of emergent behaviors

Coordination of constituents’ capabilities, organizational interoperability, and situation-aware

Centralized architecture, SOA, supply chain, reconfiguration control architecture, contract monitor, trickle-up, evolution styles, reflection, MAPE-K, observer-controller, and master-slave

Coordination, conversion, and control

P3—necessity of a decision-making or control authority

Centralized, decentralized, or full-decentralized control, and accountability of decisions

Centralized architecture, SOA, publish-subscribe, pipe-filter, supply chain, reconfiguration control architecture, infrastructure grid, trickle-up, MAPE-K, shared-data, observer-controller, and master-slave

Control

P4—evolutionary development.

Maintainability, modifiability, separation of concerns, adaptability, portability, low-coupling, flexibility, scalability, integration, and interoperability

SOA, publish-subscribe, supply chain, infrastructure grid, ESB, pace layering, evolution styles, reflection, and MAPE-K

Coordination, conversion, control

P5—resilience or adaptability of SoS architecture (e.g., dynamic reconfigurations)

Adaptability, fault-tolerance, self-organization, robustness, dynamic configurations, availability, and security

SOA, publish-subscribe, blackboard, pipe-filter, supply chain, reconfiguration control architecture, ESB, pace layering, evolution styles, reflection, and MAPE-K

Coordination and control