This symposium seeks to create an interactive forum for the advancement of the practice of systems engineering across the multiple disciplines and specialty areas associated with the engineering of complex systems. The symposium will provide a venue for systems engineering practitioners, managers, researchers, and educators to exchange innovative concepts, ideas, applications and lessons learned addressing:
• Applications-oriented topics on large-scale systems and systems-of-systems in topics noted below.
• Systems engineering, education, standards, processes and methodologies for the system-of-systems environment
• Research opportunities and results relating to systems-of-systems

Topics:
• System Architecture and Architectural Frameworks
• Engineering Systems-of-Systems
• Risk Management of Complex Systems Environment
• Systems Reliability
• Engineering Processes for Complex Systems - Includes Process
Improvement and Quality Management
• Product Lifecycle Management Processes and Tools for System-of-Systems - Includes Configuration Management (CM), Requirements management, Data Management Strategy (CMS) and Integrated Logistics Support
• Service Oriented Architectures
• Cyber Security Issues and Approaches for Complex Systems
• Enterprise Systems Engineering
• Agile Development Methods of System-of-Systems
• Modeling and Simulation
• Model-Based Systems Engineering
• Systems Verification and Validation
• Systems Engineering Competency, Education and Training
• Program/Project Management for Complex Systems
• “Systems thinking” Benefits
• Technology Transfer Between Academia and Industry
• Societal and Political Impacts of Systems and Systems Design
• Diagnostics, Prognostics, and Enterprise Health Management
• Research in Systems Engineering
• Software Systems Engineering
• System-level design
• HW/SW co-design
• Virtual prototyping
• Systems considerations about:
o Autonomous Systems
o Energy Management and Sustainability, including Renewable Energy
o Space and Communications Systems
o Medical Systems
o Gaming and Entertainment Systems
o Transportation Systems
o Sensors Integration and Application for a Net-centric Environment
o Disaster response
o Global Earth Observation
o Large-Scale Systems Integration (in any application area)

For practitioners, we invite authors to submit a descriptive abstract of at least 200 words in length. The descriptive abstract should summarize the scope of the paper and the primary results and findings, emphasizing new advances, theories and/or applications so that the program committee will be able to understand the originality and the value of the work. The abstract for practitioners must include a descriptive outline of the proposed paper.

For academic submissions, we invite authors to submit extended abstracts which should be at least four pages in length or the full paper. The abstract/paper should include an introduction, background and theory, a discussion of the validation and results, and a literature survey.