Overview and Introduction to Modeling and Simulation Support for System of Systems Engineering Applications

A little longer than a decade ago, the community of systems engineers started to seriously deal with a category of challenges: system of systems (SoS). Systems Engineering (SE) is now better understood since its official birth as a discipline in the middle of the last century. It is widely understood to control the total systems life cycle process: definition, development, deployment, and retirement of a system. SE ensures that solutions are reliable, maintainable, and cost-effective. But its solutions focus on a system made up of components born from a common set of user requirements. Interactions with other systems was always possible, but these other systems were external and beyond the central systems boundaries.