Program Summary
System-of-Systems (SoS) architectures are increasingly central in managing defense, national security and urban infrastructure applications. However, it is difficult to model and currently impossible to systematically design such complex systems using existing tools, which has led to inferior performance, unexpected problems and weak resilience. The DARPA Complex Adaptive System Composition And Design Environment (CASCADE) program seeks to address these shortcomings and fundamentally change how systems are designed for real-time resilient response to dynamic, unexpected contingencies. The goal of CASCADE is to provide a unified view of system behavior, allowing understanding and exploitation of these complex interactions and a formal language for complex adaptive system composition and design. This unified view of system behavior, enabled by appropriate mathematical foundations, may also enable adaptation to unanticipated environments using arbitrary system components by providing a framework to dynamically identify and correct deficient system capabilities.