# System of Systems Lifecycle Management--A New Concept Based on Process Engineering Methodologies
## 1 Introduction  
Nowadays, ICT (Information and Communications Technology) is continuously evolving and increasingly permeating companies, society, governments, and businesses. Organizations rely more and more on their ICT infrastructure for their business continuity. As a result, successful companies have recognized that management needs to deal with ICT as much as their other business parts. This attitude triggered the most prominent standardization organizations to provide comprehensive proposals for ITSM (Information Technology Service Management). Even the best system is worth only as much as its weakest component; therefore, the management technologies and process engineering strategies must scale with systems' sizes. This statement is especially true for industrial systems where reliable system design is a critical success factor for manufacturing. Industry 4.0 has recently established its principles [1]. According to [2, 3], the definition of Industry 4.0 can be summarized as a general terminology and concept for the fully digitized production considering the following abilities: interoperability, virtualization, decentralization, real-time capability, service orientation, and modularity. In the modular smart factories of Industry 4.0, CPS (Cyber-Physical System) processes can be monitored through virtual mapping and decentralizedreal process decisions. Real-time communication and collaboration can occur between people, between machines, or between people and machines. With the IoT (Internet of Things) domain's support, internal and external organizational services can be offered and accessed from inside or outside the enterprise. However, there is still a shortage of comprehensive lifecycle management standards and guidance due to the complexity that comes from various types of network architectures [4]. For large SoS (System of Systems), the SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) approach has been investigated as the architecture that can handle large-scale automation [5]. To manage these architectures, SOA-based IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) frameworks can serve as the infrastructure for satisfying the related conditions of SoS communication. The modular approach of Industry 4.0 requires applications to be integrated into industrial systems, e.g., CPSs, as efficiently and quickly as possible. This expectation requires, among others, up-to-date knowledge of the SoS states and the actions needed at state transitions. The research community has realized that, due to the complexity of SoS, its requirements and processes need to undergo adaptations to fit the development and management of this type of architecture according to new trends. There are proposals for this field [6; 7; 8], addressing the modeling and design requirements; however, after careful study of the literature, it can be concluded that both research answers and practical guidance for comprehensive SoS management are incomplete and not mature enough yet. The purpose of the current article is precisely to address and close this gap; therefore, it introduces a generic lifecycle model, the SoSLM (System of Systems Lifecycle Management), enhanced by an industry-specific PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) model based on the widely accepted and used ITSM frameworks and process engineering methodologies [9; 10; 11]. In order to verify the relevance of the proposed model, real development is presented using the created SoSLM model. To put this into context, an IIoT framework, namely Arrowhead--used by hundreds of partner organizations in European research and innovation actions such as ECSEL MANTS [12], Productive4.0 [13], or Arrowhead Tools [14]--is used for validation. The rest of the paper is organized as follows.