System of Systems Engineering

Dear Colleagues,

About ten years ago, INCOSE published a list of seven pain points for Systems of Systems Engineering (SoSE) (Dahmann, 2014); these were based on a survey of industry (primarily), government, and academic systems engineers, that asked practitioners to identify the SoSE problems that were keeping them awake at night. In no particular order, the problems identified were: SoS authorities; SoS leadership; constituent systems perspectives; capabilities and requirements; autonomy, interdependencies and emergence; testing, validation, and learning; SoS principles. At the time, the discussion focused largely on defining the problems caused by the pain points, but in the intervening years, approaches have been developed to address them.  These comprise ways of working, enterprise considerations, technology advances, and standards.

The definition of a System of Systems due to ISO/IEC/IEEE 21839 (ISO, 2019) has been accepted by the community:

‘System of Systems (SoS)—A set of systems or system elements that interact to provide a unique capability that none of the constituent systems can accomplish independently. Note: Systems elements can be necessary to facilitate the interaction of the constituent systems in the system of systems.’

‘Constituent Systems—Constituent systems can be part of one or more SoS. Note: Each constituent is a useful system by itself, having its development, management goals and resources, but interacts within the SoS to provide the unique capability of the SoS.’

This Special Issue invites technical and managerial contributions from academia and industry that critically evaluate or propose innovative solutions to SoS problems. The call particularly targets introducing new capabilities (e.g., AI and other elements of cyber–physical systems) and sophisticated model-based systems engineering (MBSE) to enable engineers to manage the increasingly complex and dynamic nature of future SoS.

This Special Issue particularly looks forward to articles presenting, among others:

• Application of MBSE to large, complex SoS;
• Introduction of AI as a capability for managing complex SoS;
• Approaches that take account of human contributions to SoS;
• Cyber-physical systems of systems;
• Case studies that critically analyze SoS applications (both successful and failures);
• Life cycle models and processes for managing SoS effectively;
• Advances in enterprise Systems Engineering in the context of SoS;
• Role of standards in developing and maintaining SoS capabilities;
• Capability Engineering or Mission Engineering.

Prof. Dr. Michael Henshaw
Dr. Siyuan Ji
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Systems is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• MBSE
• cyber–physical systems
• enterprise systems engineering
• AI
• standards
• capability engineering
• mission engineering