Vision and Outlook on Systems-of-Systems in the High-Tech Equipment Industry

This document outlines the TNO-ESI vision and strategic direction for research and development in the area of systems of systems, focused on the high-tech equipment industry. A system-of-systems (SoS) is a large-scale, non-monolithic, distributed, heterogeneous system, built from multiple interacting constituent systems (CS), which are independently operating systems themselves. Generally, there is no single owner or responsible for the entire SoS, yet, by collaboration in an SoS, functionalities can be provided, and behavior may emerge that would not be possible in any of its CS's alone. The main characteristic of an SoS, as opposed to a classical system consisting of components, is the autonomy and independence of the CS's. [1] SoS’s enable new applications and open up opportunities, but they also generate new challenges. CS’s are not developed together and are integrated in unforeseen ways. Emergent behavior, good or bad, cannot always be predicted because there is uncertainty about the global SoS state. This state involves the configuration of CS's, their status, and the quality and validity of the information processed by the CS's. This means that an SoS must deal with meta-information about the SoS and its CS's, and must reflect on its own operation. Development of an SoS is evolutionary, following the pace of CS’s. Additionally, security, privacy, and confidentiality are complicated when each CS has its own policy with respect to data management. There is not a single, established SoS approach or SoS Engineering (SoSE) methodology. Research on SoS and SoSE is highly context and application-dependent, and should be fcused and directed towards a specific class of SoS, a particular domain, or even specific circumstances. This report is about systems-of-systems challenges in the high-tech equipment (HTE) industry. It discusses the definition of SoS as given in the literature and identifies generic challenges. TNO-ESI and its partner organizations observe that HTE equipment is increasingly integrated in ways that are best understood by regarding the overall system as an SoS. Six SoS concerns for the HTE equipment industry were identified via interviews, and compared with three SoS roadmaps. First, the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (SEBoK[2]); second the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda of the Electronics Components and Systems community[3]; and third, the roadmap of the Road2SoS european project[4]. Combing the HTE concerns with these roadmaps and the generic challenges, a vision is proposed on SoS from the perspective of the HTE industry. The vision entails that the HTE industry is transitioning from a monolithic, product-focused perspective, to seamless and intelligent integration of equipment at the system level, becoming part of an SoS. From this vision, ten research directions are identified that address technological advances as well as advances in methodology to make this happen.