Decision Support Systems and Integrated Platforms: New Approaches for Managing Systems of Systems

Currently, in different contexts of strategic relevance, there is the increasing need of integrating and coordinating previously autonomous elements and systems to reach a common goal that is otherwise not achievable. Such a challenge requires competencies from many heterogeneous domains, leading to very complex and often ineffective management processes. The need to formalize a structured and unifying framework to support decision makers leads to the introduction of the systems of systems (SoS), that is, "large-scale integrated systems that are heterogeneous and independently operable on their own, but are networked together for a common goal"