A research agenda for systems of systems architecting

This paper, documents the activity of a workshop on defining a research agenda for Systems of Systems SoS; Architecting, which was held at USC in October 2006. After two days of invited talks on critical success factors for SoS engineering, the authors of this paper convened for one day to brainstorm topics for the purpose of shaping the near-term research agenda of the newly convened USC Center for Systems and Software Engineering (CSSE). The output from the workshop is a list of ten high-impact items with corresponding research challenges in the context of SoS Architecting. Each item includes a description of the research challenges, its link to contemporary academic or industrial problems and reasons for advocacy of that area. The items were assessed in terms of value and difficulty to determine a prioritisation both for the CSSE's future research agenda and for others in the field.