Modeling Challenges for Earth Observing Systems of Systems

Earth observing systems are undergoing an architectural transformation to perform novel scientific campaigns by dynamically composing assets from government and commercial partners. Correspondingly, campaign-level engineering methods and tools must accommodate greater degrees of decentralized control and independence. This paper reviews advances provided by semantic web technology and distributed simulation to highlight some of the challenges in modeling Earth observing systems of systems. A campaign simulation framework organizes the contextual, structural, and behavioral features necessary to model Earth observing systems from a system of systems perspective. Finally, a multi-actor value framework considers interactive negotiation of non-commensurate preferences by participating entities.