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Acknowledged System of systems (SoS) manager has no direct control over contributing systems yet they deliver capabilities required to meet the purpose of the SoS operating in an interdependent environment. Forming a joint capability by contribution requires both persuasion and negotiation between the SoS coordinator and each individual system. Negotiation here involves multiple parties, and multiple issues. The challenges here include predicting an opponent system's negotiation behavior and reaching a near optimal negotiation outcome based on the following three issues: performance demands made by the coordinator, monetary benefits in lieu of effort required, and the deadline assigned to prepare for the final SoS participation formation. The negotiation framework proposed involves an unsupervised clustering of the difference between offers from both parties on all three issues by clustering techniques. The clustering results so far indicate the presence of four prominent behaviors: selfish, semi-cooperative, opportunistic, and extremely selfish. The clustered data was used to train both a radial bass function network (RBFN) and a linear vector quantization network (LVQN) to predict future offers. Once trained, the SoS manager uses 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic representation model for decision making. A time-dependent strategy is used to generate a new offer by SoS manager to the systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Acknowledged systems of systems (SoS) lie on a continuum between authoritarian central control and anarchy. The constituent systems are independent, with a life and purpose of their own. The systems require not only technical interfaces, but also social interactions, to create the SoS. A fuzzy optimization process may be used to select a desirable SoS configuration, but it may be unachievable due to the inability to persuade the systems to cooperate in the plan. Modeling the systems’ internal decision processes could help understand how to design better SoS architectures. This research used generic, modular modeling processes to examine two proposed SoS architectures and the impact of degree of cooperation on the suitability of the achieved SoS. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]