The realization of military capability as a System of Systems (SoS), presents significant development challenges across technical, operational and programmatic dimensions. In particular, tools for deciding how to form and evolve SoS which consider performance and risk are lacking. This research leverages tools from financial engineering and operations research perspectives in portfolio optimization to assist decision making in this setting. Our approach facilitates evolutions of SoS architecture through a framework that supports architecture selection at a given decision-epoch of the evolutionary process. The approach models hierarchies of interdependent systems as generic nodes on a network that, subject to connectivity and compatibility constraints, work cohesively to fulfill overarching capability objectives. A robust portfolio algorithm is employed to address inherent real world issues of data uncertainty, inter-nodal performance and developmental risk. A naval warfare scenario illustrates application of the method to find "portfoliosˮ of systems from a candidate list of available systems. Results show how the framework effectively reduces the combinatorial complexity of tradespace exploration (e.g., connectivity rules, feasibility of solutions, optimality of solutions) by allowing the optimization problem to handle the mathematically intensive aspects of the decision-making process. As a result, human decision-makers can focus on choosing the appropriate weights for risk aversion in making final decisions. C⃝ 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 18: 269-283, 2015

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Conceptual aircraft design directly impacts the structure of an airline's route network and ability to service demand for various ticket itineraries between origin and destination city pairs. The decisions made in allocating new aircraft to serve predicted future demand of various ticket itineraries affects an airline's risk and profit potential. Therefore, choices on the selection of target market travel itineraries to be served and design requirements of new, yetto-be-introduced aircraft directly govern the tradeoff of risk against potential profit. This paper presents a concurrent engineering strategy for an airline that wishes to investigate the impact that aircraft design choices and target market capture decisions have on tradeoffs between expected profit and risk in serving particular demand itineraries. The approach considers the integrated domains of aircraft design, airline operations, and passenger demand within the context of a mathematical programming problem. More specifically, innovations are leveraged in a robust modern portfolio optimization that addresses issues of uncertainties in estimated measures of risk and reward and concurrent engineering techniques from multidisciplinary design optimization to provide integrated aircraft design solutions. The framework is first illustrated with a simple eight-city network problem where a conceptual airline seeks to identify the optimal target market capture for various demand itineraries and select an aircraft that can best maximize profits at a specified tolerance of risk from a candidate list of aircraft designs. This is then extended to the more general case of designing an aircraft under the same conditions. Nomenclature = aspect ratio C A;B;C ij Presented as

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Agent-based modeling is an important tool for the engineering of systems of systems. This paper briefly reviews the historical development of agent-based modeling and system of systems concepts, compares agent-based modeling to other approaches, and describes the Purdue Discrete Agent Framework for agent-based modeling. An application of the Discrete Agent Framework to a system of systems is described and illustrates the ability of agent-based modeling to capture non-intuitive behaviors that may arise due to the complex dynamics that occur in interconnected systems of agents that follow a behavioral set of rules. The paper concludes by looking back to the past to understand the potential for applying agent-based modeling to support the ongoing engineering and operations of an evolving system of systems.

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There is an increasing realization of the need for fundamental research in the science of systems engineering. The International Council on Systems Engineering vision document calls for theoretical foundations for systems architecting, systems design and systems understanding. During a recent NSF workshop, a number of knowledge areas ranging from mathematics, information sciences, physical sciences, systems science to human and social sciences were identified as possible sources from which the scientific foundation of systems engineering can be enhanced. However, the primary challenge facing the community lies in orchestrating the breadth and diversity of the many knowledge areas into a cohesive foundation. This paper briefly surveys systems science-related efforts across multiple application domains. The specific objectives in this paper are to present a classification of initiatives for developing foundations for systems engineering, and to discuss the challenges, and potential strategies forward, associated with systems science research. The classification is discussed using two case examples — the Internet and the air transportation system. Through these examples, some of the key research challenges and strategies are exemplified.

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