Traceability Management of Systems of Systems: A Systematic Review in the Assisted Reproduction Domain

Over last decade, Assisted Reproductive Treatment (ART) has become a very used health service by more and more people around the world because of problems such as the delay in the maternity age, singleparent couples, etc. In this context, health agencies have performed innovations to improve healthcare processes of ARTs, to optimize the performance of health professionals who work in fertilization laboratories and to improve Biological Sample Management (BSM) and sample traceability in ART. However, there are important handicaps in ART processes from the point of view of quality, safety and management. On the one hand, these processes are mainly based on manual execution tasks and manual control tasks. This excess of manual tasks could lead to fatal traceability and safety errors during BSM. On the other hand, ART processes require real, interoperable and traceable communications between different software systems that have to collaborate together (health information systems, biological sample management systems, patient management systems, etc.), but, at present, it is possible to identify some limitations in this domain, that is, the domain of systems of systems (SoS). This paper aims to conduct an exhaustive study was carried out both in the research community and in the commercial field to identify and analyze SoS solutions and theoretical proposals for BSM in ART processes. We have applied the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) methodology to carry out our study and we conclude it is a very young research line that shows a growing trend and that in the actuality there are very few technologies that deal with the problem of the BSM in ART.After analyzing the results, this paper presents as future work an initial Model-Driven conceptual solution to improve BSM in ART.