Governance & Autonomy: Towards a Governance-based Analysis of Autonomy in Cyber-Physical Systems-of-Systems

One of the main challenges in integrating Cyber-Physical System-of-Systems (CPSoS) to function as a single unified system is the autonomy of its Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), which may lead to a lack of coordination among CPSs and results in various kinds of conflicts. We advocate that to efficiently integrate CPSs within the CPSoS, we may need to adjust the autonomy of some CPSs in a way that allows them to coordinate their activities to avoid any potential conflict among one another. To achieve that, we need to incorporate the notion of governance within the design of CPSoS, which defines rules that can be used for clearly specifying who and how can adjust the autonomy of a CPS. In this paper, we try to tackle this problem by proposing a new conceptual model that can be used for performing a governance-based analysis of autonomy for CPSs within CPSoS. We illustrate the utility of the model with an example from the automotive domain.