Systems of Systems (SoS) abound in today’s world. Many common societal capabilities, including water and energy resources, air transportation and defence all are composed of SoS. Systems engineering of Systems of Systems (SoS) has been a topic of increasing interest in defence globally for the past decade. Most military missions depend on sets of systems to work together effectively as a SoS to provide the needed user capability whether those missions are implemented by a single nation or by a coalition. While most nations acquire individual systems, to be effective they need to be engineered to work as part of the larger SoS they will support once deployed. In many cases systems were not originally designed for a particular SoS, may support multiple SoS for multiple missions, and are owned and operated by independent organization with their own goals and objectives. Therefore SoS pose certain challenges to systems engineering. That can be seen as a new level of sophistication on systems enginnering.
In a SoS, it is important to identify the critical set of systems that affect the SoS capability objectives and understand their interrelationships. It can be difficult to establish the boundaries of a SoS since the constituent systems of the SoS typically will have different owners and supporting organizational structures beyond the SoS management.
Further, a SoS can place demands on constituent systems that are not supported by those systems’ designs. Combinations of systems operating together within the SoS contribute to the overall capabilities. Combining systems may lead to emergent behaviors more than is usually seen in single systems. As with emergent behaviors of single systems, these behaviors may either improve performance or degrade it.
In addition, beyond the ability of the systems to support the functionality and performance called for by the SoS, there can be differences among the systems in characteristics that contribute to SoS “suitability” such as reliability, supportability, maintainability, assurance, and safety.… The challenge of design in a SoS is to leverage the functional and performance capabilities of the constituent systems to achieve the desired SoS capability as well as the crosscutting characteristics of the SoS to ensure the meets the broader user needs.
Stratosphere S.A. applies these concepts to all the programs involved, enabling a beyond state of art approach to systems engineering, with the right mix of advanced materials systems, electronics, integration and interoperability.
Stratosphere S.A. is a global provider of integrated health management solutions. The robustness and integration of its solutions are the pinnacle of SHM systems.
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