Wicked Cases and Late Binding in System of Systems

Systems of Systems is being applied in ever more complex contexts. This paper reports findings from a city logistics initiative. As many other environmental challenges, this setting can be characterized as “wicked”, e.g. the organizations that need to be involved solving the issues are contributing causes and there is no obvious single authority able to make decisions. Our findings suggest that such settings lead to vagueness and “late binding” of key actors and incentives making the early modelling phases highly challenging. Supplementing the wave model of SoS development, we describe specific coping mechanisms for such settings including designing for multiple SoS archetypes and identifying and prioritizing archetype-generic capabilities.

I. Introduction

Increasingly, individuals, organizations and entire societies find themselves facing highly complex interwoven problems that have proven difficult to address with traditional engineering approaches [1]. Climatic change and environmental problems are areas where problems are difficult not only to solve but occasionally to even describe in a manner agreeable to all stakeholders [2]. While such challenges were originally coined “wicked” [3], this initial definition have since been refined, expanded and grouped in various ways [4, 5].