Special Sessions

EXTENDED DEADLINE: January 4, 2026

Aerospace products are often complex and pose significant challenges to systems engineering, in particular safety issues. This special session welcomes discussions on systems engineering issues related to aerospace domain.  Authors may submit theoretical or practical use case papers in the aerospace area or other areas where the solutions can also be used by aerospace applications.

Observing the recent progresses in adaptive/adaptable systems and AI, topics that are also related with aerospace systems, this session also calls papers in these areas. 

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Additional Resources/FAQ:

Information on related topics includes but is not limited to:

1. IEEE/INCOSE: Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge on System Adaptability
2. INCOSE System Adaptability Workgroup
3. Complex Adaptive Systems Conference 2025 (at MIT)

This Special Session focuses on System Architecture Optimization (SAO) — highlighting recent advances and emerging directions in integrating architecture modeling, evaluation, and optimization within complex engineering systems.

System Architecture Optimization (SAO) applies numerical optimization algorithms to the generation and evaluation of system architectures. This enables exploration of extremely large combinatorial design spaces often present in architecture design problems, many of which require simulation-based evaluation.

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The development of modern systems has grown increasingly complex due to rising demands for enhanced sustainability, sophisticated features, seamless technological integration, and accelerated production timelines. These evolving requirements present significant challenges in maintaining consistency, traceability, and agility across the development lifecycle.

This Special Session focuses on digitalization and intelligence-driven methods that enable the transformation of Systems Engineering (SE) toward a more model-based, integrated, and data-continuous paradigm. It explores how digital technologies, artificial intelligence (AI), and multidisciplinary optimization can be integrated within SE frameworks to enhance decision-making, collaboration, and lifecycle integration across complex engineering domains such as automotive, aerospace, and transportation systems.

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Maritime and naval platforms are becoming increasingly complex, requiring a digital transformation in systems engineering to address challenges in survivability, resilience, interoperability, and safety. This Special Session focuses on the application of Digital Engineering principles—including Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), digital twins, and digital threads—to the design, analysis, and operation of maritime power and energy systems.

We invite contributions that demonstrate how digital methods enhance traceability, integration, and decision-making across the system lifecycle, with emphasis on system-of-systems behavior, data-driven engineering, and cross-domain interoperability.

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Critical infrastructure systems—including energy, transportation, communication, and cyber-physical infrastructures—are increasingly interconnected and interdependent, forming complex system-of-systems whose resilience is essential for societal safety, economic stability, and sustainable development. The tight coupling among these infrastructures makes them vulnerable to cascading failures, extreme events, cyber-physical threats, and long-term sustainability challenges, posing significant challenges to systems engineering.

This Special Session focuses on AI-enabled and system-of-systems approaches for enhancing the resilience of critical infrastructure systems. The session aims to provide a forum for discussing system-level modeling, intelligent decision-making, and coordinated resilience strategies across interdependent infrastructures. Emphasis is placed on integrating artificial intelligence, data-driven methods, and systems engineering principles to support situational awareness, adaptive response, recovery, and resilience-oriented planning under uncertainty.

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