An Engineering Systems Perspective on System of Systems Methodology

Traditional methodologies for system design and development have proven insufficient when it comes to very large and distributed systems. As a consequence, research on complex socio-technical systems i.e. System-of-Systems [SoS], has evolved, At the same time, researchers of complex systems that are not SoS have started to pay attention to the tools and methods developed within the area of SoS. The purpose of this paper is therefore twofold: (1) to improve the understanding of SoS and SoS methods from a non-SoS point of view, by presenting SoS definitions, properties and behavior of SoS, and (2) to analyze current non-SoS development methodologies to test their applicability in a SoS environment. Finally a metric for the well-being of a SoS is introduced.