The concept of Systems-of-Systems (SoS) has become increasingly important across domains such as engineering, defence, healthcare, and digital infrastructure, describing complex assemblies of independent systems that collectively deliver capabilities beyond individual components. However, the concept remains debated: are SoS objective engineering entities or “constructs” used to interpret socio-technical complexity? Having its origins in the context of systems engineering and defence acquisition, SoS are defined by its operational and managerial independence, evolutionary development, and emergent behaviour. While these traits distinguish SoS from supersystems, they also reflect how complexity is framed. Two main perspectives are examined. The engineering perspective treats SoS as designable and controllable entities, emphasizing architecture, standards, governance, and lifecycle management approaches. Here, the challenge is extending traditional engineering methods to address scale, decentralization, and emergence. In contrast, the constructivist perspective sees SoS as interpretive frameworks for understanding loosely coupled, evolving systems shaped by organizational and social contexts. In this view, system boundaries, purposes, and identities are fluid and negotiated. Each perspective has implications. Engineering approaches support structure and measurable performance but may overlook human and political dynamics. Constructivist approaches highlight power, incentives, and adaptation but offer less practical design guidance. The paper argues that real-world SoS embody both views, combining engineered structures with emergent, socially shaped dynamics. It proposes a synthesized perspective that understands SoS as socio-technical phenomena—partly designed and partly constructed. This dual view suggests that effective SoS design and management require integrating engineering practices with insights from organizational theory, complexity science, and systems thinking.
The Future of Systems Engineering (FuSE) programme has called for the discipline to evolve as a transdiscipline capable of engaging complex eco‐socio‐technical challenges. Yet the pace of that evolution has been slower than the arguments for it would predict. This article examines why. It argues that systems engineering as institutionally constituted, through its standards, handbooks, professional bodies, certification pathways, and educational curricula, encodes the epistemological stance of what Morin terms restricted complexity, and that this encoding reflects the historical conditions under which the discipline was formed and the commercial and contractual pressures that continue to sustain it. Drawing on prior papers that develop the epistemological framework (Leal Ascencio, 2026a) and the empirical evidence from the UK Ajax armoured vehicle programme (Leal Ascencio, 2026b), I advance a disciplinary and institutional argument for what I term the reflexive turn in systems engineering. I identify four institutional sites at which reform would be required, namely the standards ecosystem, the INCOSE governance structure, the professional formation of engineers, and the community's own scholarly and conference practices. I anticipate specific lines of pushback that reform would encounter and address each in turn. The paper is offered as a contribution to the FuSE conversation and to the special issue's call for advancing systems engineering in the face of complexity, drawing on two decades of training practising systems engineers as the experiential foundation for the disciplinary observations advanced here.
Systems engineering faces a puzzle. The intellectual case for reforming the discipline to address complex socio‐technical situations has been available for some time. The Future of Systems Engineering programme has taken up this case; the guest editors of this special issue have themselves published substantial work on the discipline's transdisciplinary evolution. Yet the pace of institutional change has been slower than the intellectual case would predict. This article proposes an explanation and a response.
The Explanation is That Systems Engineering As Institutionally Constituted Encodes What Morin terms Restricted Complexity, and that this encoding reflects the historical conditions of the discipline's formation and the commercial, contractual, and Formation‐Based Pressures That Continue to Sustain it. The response is a Set of Specific Proposals For What I term the Reflexive Turn in Systems engineering: a Coordinated Programme of Institutional Reform Addressing the Standards Ecosystem, INCOSE governance and the FuSE programme, professional formation, and the community's own scholarly practices.
The Article Makes Three Contributions of Direct Significance to the Systems Engineering community. First, it develops a political economy of the discipline that identifies the historical formation, the Institutional Apparatus, and the sustaining pressures that produce the reform difficulties the FuSE programme confronts. Second, it works through precedents for the reflexive turn from three adjacent disciplines that have undergone analogous reforms, namely architecture, safety science, and nursing science, and Derives from Them Concrete Models For Institutional change. Third, It Advances Specific Proposals For Reform At Each of the Four Institutional Sites Identified, Grounded in Two Decades of Training Practising Systems Engineers Across Defence, aerospace, infrastructure, and the public sector.
The paper rests on established epistemological foundations set out in a companion paper published in Kybernetes and on documented empirical evidence set out in a companion paper published in Safety Science. Together, the three papers form a coherent triptych with distinct contributions. The present article is the disciplinary intervention: its purpose is to identify what the framework and evidence require of systems engineering as an institutional formation, and to offer concrete proposals through which the INCOSE community and the FuSE programme could take up the reflexive turn. It responds directly to the special issue's call for advancing systems engineering in the face of complexity.
Raul Ricardo Leal Ascencio· Systems Engineering· 0 citations
The article is dedicated to examining how contemporary design systems support the scalability of digital products through architectural principles, tokenization practices, and component modeling. The relevance of the study stems from the rapid expansion of multi-platform ecosystems, where fragmented interfaces undermine product coherence and increase development overhead. The novelty lies in treating the design system not as a static guideline set but as an evolving architectural structure that shapes consistency through modular organization, semantic token frameworks, and stable component hierarchies. The work describes the interplay between these elements and studies how they collectively sustain visual and behavioral alignment across distributed teams. Special attention is paid to the role of system governance, bottom-up evolution, and design-to-code convergence. The work sets itself a goal of identifying mechanisms through which design systems maintain cohesion as products and teams scale. To achieve this, analytical and comparative methods are applied. The conclusion describes the stabilizing effect of unified design architectures and their value for long-term product development. The article will be useful for researchers, UX architects, product designers, and engineering teams involved in large-scale digital systems.
Volkodav Vladyslav· Universal Library of Innovat...· 0 citations
Abstract. System-of-Systems Engineering (SoSE) studies how independent constituent systems interact to generate emergent capabilities. However, it is challenging linking the study operations and SoSE to software implementation and agent-based simulations. This paper considers communication as the primary architectural concern and examines how software architectures can improve SoS modelling and simulation. In particular, by relating software architectures to Observe–Orient–Decide–Act (OODA) loops, which are a promising structure for aligning communication, decision logic, and agent interactions with modular and traceable agent architectures. The goal of this work is to explore how communication within SoS architectures can be better structured, represented, and analysed through software engineering and agent-based modelling frameworks in the context of hierarchical and cooperative operational environments, where information exchange directly influences system performance and emergent outcomes.
Background
J. Lovaco· Materials Research Proceedin...· 0 citations
Systems-of-systems (SoSs) integrate constituents that retain operational and managerial independence, and that independence leaves their engineering artifacts prone to drift: changes fail to propagate, misalignment surfaces late, and outputs accumulate that trace to no validated need. A recurring consequence is a stalled SoS: years of effort across independent teams yielding no usable, connected baseline. The SoS-engineering and complex-system-governance literature describes what governance should achieve but under-specify how to recover one that has lost coherence. This paper introduces ADAPT (Anchor, Dependency, Allocation, Production, Traceability), whose components operationalize the integrating purposes a stalled SoS has lost: communication, coordination, control, and integration. It enhances rather than replaces control boards and program offices. ADAPT is illustrated through four de-identified cases (feasibility evidence, not a test) under a case-study protocol; in the lead case, six prior teams under the same program’s funding and sponsorship had produced no usable baseline, whereas the ADAPT-led attempt reached an approved one in four months against an eighteen-month plan of record. The evidence is retrospective, single-organization, and uncontrolled, supporting this paper’s propositions analytically rather than statistically. ADAPT’s measures are exercised on independent public data as construct validation and premise checks, and a confirmatory study with falsification conditions is specified for pre-registration.
Many of today's most pressing scientific challenges arise from interactions among natural, human, and technical systems. Yet the institutions through which science is conducted remain largely organized along disciplinary and organizational boundaries. As a result, the limiting factor in addressing complex problems is increasingly not only knowledge, data, or computational capability, but the ability to integrate expertise across domains and institutions over time. From a systems engineering perspective, the scientific enterprise can be viewed as a complex socio‐technical system whose performance depends on how effectively its human and institutional components are organized and connected. This article argues that advancing science in an interconnected world requires treating collaboration as a designed system capability rather than an emergent by‐product of individual research efforts. Drawing on insights from organizational science, sociology of science, and team science, it identifies three key structural elements that support sustained scientific collaboration: a cohesive core that provides coordination and continuity, boundary‐spanning connectors that integrate knowledge across communities, and long‐term commitment expressed through structures that sustain relationships and learning over time. Together, these elements represent architectural features of the human systems through which science is conducted. Deliberately designing these human systems offers a pathway for science to more effectively address complex societal challenges characterized by interaction, interdependence, and cascading effects.
Jadwiga H. Richter, Soudeh Kamali· Systems Engineering· 0 citations
Context is at the heart of systemic cognition, a new theoretical framework that supports human systems integration (HSI) of sociotechnical systems (STSs). An STS is a complex system that involves humans and machines. Our claim is that we cannot discuss, analyze, design, and assess an STS without considering the contexts in which it is designed, developed, validated, operated, maintained, and ultimately dismantled. More specifically, this is why we need a clearer understanding of what we mean by “context” in STS design and operations. The central assumption of the systemic cognition approach is that we gradually become familiar with the complexity of an STS through the creation and refinement of conceptual models in context. This process is incremental and integrative (i.e., anytime emerging behaviors, phenomena, and properties are discovered from experience, they are integrated into the STS at work). We then need not only to provide a situated framework for operations people but also to guide engineering people in HSI. This is the purpose of systemic cognition in context (SCC). Therefore, how can we figure out relevant contexts? How can we model them? How do we integrate them into the systemic cognition framework to support HSI? More specifically, how are systemic cognition resources (SCRs) framed and articulated in appropriate contexts? This article proposes a constructivist approach for further defining context-aware systemic cognition that encompasses the entire life cycle of an STS and is useful for tangibility testing and traceability. A review of relevant philosophical approaches to context is presented, along with several concrete implementation efforts. Examples are used to support the SCC framework being developed.