Fostering collaboration in systems of systems

Human society is fundamentally a hierarchical set of nested systems with systems. With the exception of the viewpoint of proponents of socio-technical systems, our view of technological systems has tended to treat each system in isolation. The growth of local and wide area networking, and especially the ease of digital communications brought about by the Internet, has allowed many of our technological systems to become more closely integrated than before. The prospects of broad and effective collaboration and cooperation within these large aggregates of distributed systems promises to lower the cost of ownership and increase the effectiveness of the linked systems. This view has come to be called the System of Systems (SoS) view, and has been embraced by numerous data-intensive operational communities, including defense command and control, law enforcement, health care and financial institutions. This paper describes aspects of the Air Traffic Management Partnership, a development effort led by Lockheed Martin with the participation of Applied Systems Intelligence, Inc. and others to define the foundational elements of a distributed collaborative air traffic management system. Particular attention is focused in this paper on the nature of the interactions required to foster collaboration and cooperation within the bounded real-time communications and safety environment of air traffic management.