Organizations perceive that systems of systems can help them achieve important business and mission goals more effectively. Yet, they are finding that systems of systems are difficult to acquire, develop, test, and operate.

Research-based

Our work is grounded in system-of-systems research. The core of our research work is a set of system-of-systems principles, including

• Distributed, loosely coupled collaboration promotes system-of-systems agility.
• Independent and continuous evolution means that system-of-systems behavior cannot be completely predicted.
• Influence is more important than control in getting collaboration among system-of-systems stakeholders.

We apply and continue to refine these principles as we investigate

• system-of-systems engineering (leveraging service-oriented architecture life-cycle issues) 

Providing proven tools

We apply our research findings to real-world situations through engagements with our customers. Those experiences and collaborations with other researchers enable us to develop, pilot, mature, and make available these system-of-systems tools and methods:

• Mission Thread Workshop for Systems of Systems to elicit architectural and engineering considerations for the mission thread from stakeholders
• System Architecture Tradeoff and Analysis Method to assess consequences of architectural decisions regarding quality attribute requirements and business goals and to discover the risks such decisions create in the system architecture
• System of Systems Architecture Evaluation Method to identify system of systems architectural risks and quality attribute inconsistencies across the constituent systems

Offering unbiased guidance and assistance

Consider us to be your independent, third-party consulting advisor whether your organization is

• working toward legacy system migration to an SOA environment (Get started by visiting our SOA information center)
• looking to manage its systems of systems more effectively in a turbulent demand environment
• engaging in a multienterprise acquisition
• beginning to investigate popular technologies for systems interoperability

As a federally funded research and development center, the SEI is vendor neutral, realistic about the current effectiveness of technologies and standards, and focused on the widespread transition of the best practices for systems of systems, whatever their origin.