Complex Adaptive Systems of Systems Engineering

Our goal is to engineer solutions to problems within the vastly complex and critically important eco-socio-economic-technical systems that are all fundamentally Complex Adaptive Systems of Systems (CASoS) with influence spanning local to regional to national to global scales. We deliver multi-faceted strategic design for risk mitigation that is robust to uncertainty.

We must understand CASoS to design a secure future for the nation and the world. Perturbations/disruptions in CASoS bring with them the potential for far-reaching effects due to highly-saturated interdependencies and attendant vulnerabilities to cascades in associated systems.

For example, the global effects of disruption within CASoS can be seen in the impacts of the Japanese earthquake/tsunami on not only the people and industry of Japan, but also on US car manufacturers, on global energy and financial markets, and on the future of nuclear power production around the world. We approach this sort of high-impact problem space as engineers, devising interventions or problem solutions that influence CASoS to achieve specific aspirations, an activity we call CASoS Engineering.

Through application to real-world problems...

Call to arms, join the evolution the CASoS Engineering Initiative at Sandia National Laboratories is evolving CASoS Engineering principles while growing a community of practice and the CASoS engineers to populate it. The Initiative is both grounded in reality and works to extend our understanding and control of that reality; it is both a solution within a CASoS and a CASoS itself. A summary of our approach is presented in Complex Adaptive Systems of Systems (CASoS) Engineering: Mapping Aspirations to Problem Solutions, given at the 8th International Conference on Complex Systems, June 2011, Quincy, MA.