An Ontological Approach for Architecture Design of a Smart Tourism System-of-Systems

doi:10.23940/ijpe.20.04.p10.587598

Abstract

Abstract:

With the rapid growth of software products, software-intensive system-of-systems (SiSoS) is gradually taking shape in many domains, whilst the existing software systems are considered as constituent systems in the SoS. In this research, smart tourism is considered as a SiSoS, which can provide tourists with a better service by gathering abilities of different software systems. However, in system-of-systems engineering, architecture design always consumes a large chunk of time and human resources, with the main reason being knowledge barriers between various fields, which means that knowledge cannot be easily transferred across domains. Consequently, the architecture design is a work that relies on subject-matter experts' communication. Therefore, architecture design is a vital challenge in the development of smart tourism SoS. This paper represents a knowledge-driven architecture design method, which contains two parts. On one hand, ontology is applied as the knowledge representation method so that the constituents' information can be visualised in graph format; on the other hand, description logic based inference rules are designed to be combined with creativity to reason potential connections between the tourism constituent systems. The former helps stakeholders and domain experts understand knowledge of different domains, and the latter assists in revealing potential relationships that can be built between the independent constituent systems. Both of them aim to support decision making for architecture design of the smart tourism SoS. Therefore, the proposed novel ontological approach provides a more automatic method for architecture design in the software-intensive smart tourism SoS. The approach is applied and evaluated in a prototype of Jiangsu Tourism SoS as an application scenario.

Key words: ontological approach, creativity techniques, software-intensive system-of-systems, description logic, architecture design

Yingchun Tian, Delin Jing, Changchun Yang, Yanxue Chen, and Hongji Yang. An Ontological Approach for Architecture Design of a Smart Tourism System-of-Systems [J]. Int J Performability Eng, 2020, 16(4): 587-598.

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