Does System-of-Systems Thinking Work for Self-Governance of Digitally Transforming Systems?

Keeping humans in the loop or bringing them back into the loop in dynamically changing socio-technical systems requires the human-centered arrangement of system designs and the adoption of digital artefacts according to human capabilities and needs. Design-integrated engineering of System-of-Systems (SoS) facilitates the complex interplay of cyber-physical technologies and humans both through model-driven and interactive handling. In this contribution, SoS thinking is introduced as an approach to self-governance of cyber-physical infrastructures and digital appliances. It allows socio-technical system development to be based on the focused articulation of stakeholder interests and behavior, by using them as a baseline for digital twin modeling. In this way, digital twins can represent the system designs and implementation details required for engineering. As such, they enable various pathways to SoS self-governance in cyber-physical settings.