3. On the Architecture of Systems for Situation Awareness

Architectures for situation awareness systems originate from two main concerns: a functional view on the information processing that stems from domain experts’ understanding of their tasks and resources, and a system architect’s view on non-functional aspects of the operations that form such functionality within a system-of-systems realization. In this chapter, we describe how these concerns require the use of three architectural concepts: (a) information flows that transport information between systems together with metadata addressing system concerns, (b) a flexible combination of transport methods that steer these information flows, and (c) a multi-stage timing that offers short-term memory to sensibly combine and transform information and long-term memory to store higher-order knowledge. Together, these concepts address, or enable solutions for, many challenges faced by systems-of-systems for situation awareness, like configuration dynamics, handling of uncertainty, system and information health, and information protection and access control.