Systems-of-Systems Engineering and the Pragmatics of Demand

Systems of systems that manage health care or enable Albert's "power to the edge" are expected to provide the flexibility to engage multiple enterprises in innovative, collaborative, ways to solve problems. This paper describes a systems engineering approach to engineer infrastructure that will support the restriction of systems of systems behavior at the time of use rather than at design time. We present a process for describing demands within their context of use, and how organizational variations in collaborative approaches (geometries-of-use) can be related to variations in these demands-in-context (pragmatics), thus giving a way to engineer a systems-of-systems' agility i.e. its ability to adapt to changing demands.