UNCLASSIFIED Systems of Systems and Coordinated Atomic Actions

System of systems (SoS) is an emerging field in the design and development of complex systems that are built from large scale component systems. A SoS has the following attributes: operational and managerial independence of components, a geographic extent that limits control mechanisms to information exchange, an evolutionary nature, and emergent behavior. The subsystems that comprise the SoS often are built by different organizations with conflicting goals, designed under different assumptions and built to different quality standards. These factors impact fault detection, fault isolation, and fault tolerance and can result in systems that cannot easily be debugged, integrated, or maintained. When fault detection and fault tolerance are deficient, the system ma