Treffer: Architecting Mission Emergence in Collaborative Systems of Systems.

The mission of a collaborative system of systems (SoS) necessarily emerges from interactions between its constituent systems (CS) as it lacks central management with coercive power. Defining a set of potential missions for a collaborative SoS, or 'mission interface', is a form of mission engineering and a key opportunity for system architects as it can both increase collaboration between CS and influence SoS direction. An agent-based model of a collaborative SoS was constructed to understand how the level collaboration between CS changes in response to different articulations of SoS-level goals. The model shows that adjusting the number and concentration of SoS-level goals drives unique mission emergence outcomes. It also shows that an optimal relationship likely exists between the number and concentration of potential goals articulated by an architect and the number and characteristics of CS in that SoS. Understanding how to construct this mission interface to create specific outcomes will enable architects to better engineer collaborative SoS in the absence of coercive power and central management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]