Current Landscape of System of Systems Engineering

This paper presents a description of the current landscape of systems of systems (SoS) engineering based on the results of a meta-analysis of 168 IEEE papers published between 2020 and 2023 on SoS. Using IEEE Xplore, papers with ‘system of systems’ in their title were downloaded and reviewed to develop a description of the current state of SoS engineering. Using ChatGPT 4.0 as an assist, the papers were reviewed, and the results are presented in this paper. This includes how SoS was defined across these papers, the geographical distribution of authors, the domain areas addressed, the technologies included in both the SoS themselves and in the SoS engineering methods. This includes the use of model-based approaches, graph analysis and artificial intelligence. Finally challenges and benefits cited across the papers are summarized.