About the special issue on: "Distributed Complex Systems: Governance, Engineering, and Maintenance".

The volume at hand presents the Special Issue on "Distributed Complex Systems: Governance, Engineering, and Maintenance". The Special Issue has been originally conceived within the context of the 2nd International Workshop on Governing Adaptive and Unplanned Systems of Systems (GAUSS 2020), one of the co‐located events of the 31st International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2020). The authors of the best papers at GAUSS 2020 have been invited to submit an extended version of their previous work. In addition, the editors opened the submission also to all the other researches working on technical and managerial solution for governing Distributed Complex Systems. Ultimate objective of the editors with this Special Issue is to promote discussions focusing on anticipating, mitigating, or reacting to scenarios that were unplanned or under‐specified at design time. This open Special Issue collects both invited contributions from the 2nd International Workshop GAUSS 2020, co‐located with ISSRE 2020, and works from the whole research community. The Special Issue collects eight valuable research articles: four from GAUSS and four from the open call. Overall, the addressed topics span from the design, the development, the validation, and the continuous maintenance of distributed complex systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]