Towards a Software Architecture Maturity Model for Improving Ultra-Large-Scale Systems Interoperability

69 Abstract. For the last two decades, software architecture has been adopted as one of the main viable solutions to address the ever-increasing demands in the design and development of software systems. Nevertheless, the rapidly growing utilization of communication networks and interconnections among software systems have introduced some critical challenges, which need to be handled in order to fully unleash the potential of these systems. In this respect, Ultra-Large-Scale (ULS) systems, generally considered as a system of systems, have gained considerable attention, since their scale is incomparable to the traditional systems. The scale of ULS systems makes drastic changes in various aspects of system development. As a result, it requires that we broaden our understanding of software architectures and the ways we structure them. In this paper, we investigate the lack of an architectural maturity model framework for ULS system interoperability, and propose an architectural maturity model framework to improve ULS system interoperability.