Behaving nicely in a system of systems – harmonising with the environment

Systems of Systems (SoS) Engineering has emerged as an important area of study; as the interconnectedness of systems rapidly increases, new challenges are arising that are of global impact. A major difficulty in SoS is that individual systems operators tend to maximize the performance of their own systems at the expense of the overall performance of the SoS. In this chapter a set of global drivers for encouraging “nice behavior” are identified. The results of a European project to identify a strategic research agenda in SoS are presented and the relationships of the research themes to the global drivers are explained.