Emergent Behavior in Systems of Systems

As the development of systems of systems becomes more important in global ventures, so does the issues of emergent behavior. The challenge for systems engineers is to predict and analyze emergent behavior, especially undesirable behavior, in systems of systems. In this paper we briefly discuss definitions of emergent behavior, describe a large-scale system of system that exhibits emergent behavior, review previous approaches to analyzing emergent behavior, and then present a system modeling and simulation approach that has promise of allowing systems engineers to analyze potential emergent behavior in large scale systems of systems.