A Functional Approach to Life Cycle Simulation for System of Systems

Life cycle simulation (LCS) evaluates dynamic material flows in the life cycles of a single product family. However, in reality, there are various interactions between different product life cycles, such as demand substitution among different types of products and the global reuse of components in other products. In this paper, an entire system consisting of multi-kind product life cycles is regarded as a system of systems (SoS), which is an assemblage of systems where each system possesses operational and managerial independence. This paper proposes an LCS system for SoS that will support engineers in making decisions about system management through describing and simulating interactions.