A Novel Approach to Mission-Level Engineering of Complex Systems of Systems: Addressing Integration and Interoperability Shortfalls by Interrogating the Interstitials

Abstract : This paper will establish a class of Systems of Systems (SoSs) defined as Mission-Level Systems of Systems and will explicitly explore and propose a solution to engineering the Integration and Interoperability (I&I) issues confronting Mission-Level SoSs. Mission-level engineering revolves around the concept of a mission context which manages uncertainties, dynamics and stochastic behaviors of SoS's. It has been posited that complex SoS's are driven not by the performance and behaviors of the constituent components, rather they are driven by the complex integration and interoperability, the interstitials, of the components to achieve Mission-level goals. Building upon this work, the authors, SoS practitioners, present a model-based SoS engineering approach that defines a SoS/mission architecture using both a physical space and multiple event space constructs explicitly accounting for both architectural and employment nuances of the SoS. A modeling approach, which explicitly defines the interstitials in physical space as operable nodes in event space, will be presented. An exploration of extensions to agent-based modeling is proposed herein along with the discussion of the Event Space modeling approach. This paper provides an approach to Mission-level engineering of Systems of Systems, addressing traditional integration and interoperability shortfalls by interrogating the interstitials.