Software Engineering Institute

Creating a successful system of systems—one that meets the needs of its stakeholders today and can evolve and scale to sustain those stakeholders into the future—is a very complex engineering challenge. In a system of systems (SoS), one of the biggest challenges is achieving cooperation and interoperation among systems through some form of system integration. Previous work has approached the information system integration challenge in a generic way, not specific to a SoS context, or has provided only a limited range of solutions. This technical report discusses how an IT architect can address the SoS integration challenge from an architectural perspective; it also illustrates the breadth of potential solutions to the challenge through a categorization of SoS software architectural patterns. To demonstrate the practical relevance of this work, the authors instantiate this categorization with a set of patterns described in both the research literature and by companies that support SoS platforms.