Fundamentals and architectures of Complex Distributed Systems

Complex distributed systems (CODS) are widespread in natural and artificial systems, not necessarily very large in scale or very dispersed in geographic range. The complexity of CODS is essentially attributed to the inherent autonomy of the sub-systems and the dynamic intricate interactions among the sub-systems, which give rise to the distributing, emergent and self-organizing properties and system-of-systems architectures. This paper preliminarily explores the system-of-systems architectures of CODS, and the meta-synthesis model for cooperative distributed problem solving in CODS.