Evaluating Australia's most complex system-of-systems, the future submarine: A case for using new Complex Systems Governance

As many systems grew in complexity and connected to other existing systems, the concept of Systems of Systems (SoS) was developed to explain the behavior, operation and design of these more complex and inter-connected systems. Early research recognized the difficulty in classic testing and evaluating (T&E) for these SoS. Much effort has been expended attempting to predict the emergent behaviors in SoSs, developing and executing T&E programs involving more sophisticated multi-factor and multi-response statistical techniques, and then recovering when some unpredicted emergent behaviors were discovered despite these efforts. Recently, an emerging concept of Complex System Governance (CSG) has been developed as yet another weapon in the armory for managing development of complex interdependent capability architectures. CSG is based on a firm grounding in System Theory and Management Cybernetics. The potential application of robust CSG structure to reduce or mitigate emergent T&E surprises is proposed in this paper. Using Australia's Future Submarine (FSM) program as an illustration, this paper has examined the need for such an application, examine several of the governance propositions focused on the developmental T&E regime and provided potential areas to leverage the efficacy of this approach to such major development programs.