Architectural support for socio-technical systems

Software development paradigms are increasingly stretching their scope from the core technical implementation of required functionalities to include processes and people who interact with the implemented systems. Socio-technical systems reflect such a trend as they incorporate the interactions and processes of their social participants, by treating them not as users but as integral players who enact well-defined roles. However, developers of these systems struggle with their complexity and weak architectural support. The challenge is that existing toolboxes for modelling and implementing complex software systems do not take into account interactions that are not causal, but only biddable (i.e. whose execution cannot be ensured by software). Therefore, models and implementations generated by these toolboxes cannot detect and respond to situations in which the system participants deviate from prescribed behaviour and fail to play the role that they have been assigned as entities of the system. The research focus is on how a norm-based architectural framework can promote the externalisation of the social dimension that arises in software-intensive systems which exhibit interactions between social components (i.e. people or groups of people) and technical components (devices, computer-based systems and so on) that are critical for the domain in which they operate. This includes building normative models for evolvable and adaptable socio-technical systems to target such interactions in a way that ensures that the required global properties emerge. The proposed architectural framework is based on a new class of architectural connectors (social laws) that provide mechanisms through which the biddability of human interactions can be taken into account, and the sub-ideal situations that result from the violation of organisational norms can be modelled and acted upon by self-adapting the socio-technical systems. The framework is equipped with a new method underpinned by a coherent body of concepts and supported by a graph-based formalism in which roles present the structural semantics of the configuration, while the laws have operational semantics given by the graph transformations rules. Guiding methodological steps are given to support the identification of critical social interactions and the implementation of the proposed method. Case studies derive the evaluation of the approach to demonstrate its generality, applicability, flexibility and maintainability.