A distributed simulation approach for modeling and analyzing systems of systems

Certain business objectives cannot be met without the interaction and communication between different systems. An interesting concept called system of systems (SoS), which aims to describe this interaction between systems has been gaining attention in the last few years. In this paper an extensive review of the literature is performed to capture the main characteristics associated to this concept in order to propose a new, more complete definition. This paper also proposes the use of distributed simulation through the High Level Architecture (HLA) rules to model and simulate systems of systems. We illustrate our idea with two different examples; a simplified supply chain network of a computer assembly and an aircraft initial sizing scenarios. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the significant advantages distributed simulation could offer over traditional simulation for the analysis of such complex systems.