A SYSTEM OF SYSTEMS (SOS) APPROACH TO DISPUTE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

There has been an increasing attention towards more effective dispute avoidance and resolution in the construction industry due to the significance of the costs associated with disputes. Many researchers have attempted to develop systems that aim to manage disputes by providing dispute evaluation, negotiation support, litigation prediction and decision support through the use of various tools. Although these systems have been developed separately, a careful consideration shows that they can be incorporated into a meta-system that pools their resources and capacities to obtain more functionality and performance. This aim fits well with the System of Systems (SoS) approach, which includes incorporating a collection of independent and task-oriented systems into a new, more complex system offering more utility than the sum of the constituent systems. After analysing current dispute management systems in the literature, a framework has been developed for the integration of these systems by SoS approach. The primary objective of developing a SoS framework is modelling the opportunities of cooperation while maintaining independence of the constituent systems, and exploring new systems required in an evolving perspective for a holistic management of disputes in the construction domain. The findings reveal that SoS represents a structured and comprehensive approach to modelling dispute management systems as a networked meta-system. SoS approach provides mechanisms to analysing and classifying existing systems, modelling the opportunities of cooperation between the constituent systems, adding or subtracting systems to and from the system in evolution, and maintaining the same amount of management and resources as before with more precise results from each system. As a result, the effectiveness of the constituent systems is expected to increase due to interoperability and resource sharing in the SoS framework.