Modeling a Community as a System of Systems: A Methodology For Data Integration

We live, work and play within interacting and embedded systems of systems. While systems of systems engineering may be perceived as primarily physical or “hard” infrastructure, we live in critical systems of systems that emerge within physical and social systems. One such example is the living community system, one that strongly impacts our health and the way we live. The complex interconnected living environment is becoming a central focus for improvement given its strong influence on health in general and on how chronic conditions arise and persist. Such a strong focus on our community living environment has prompted various level regions (i.e. cities, districts) to take action in their communities. Stakeholders have turned to national data sources to inform a region of the many factors that describe it. However, these multiple factor datasets should be analyzed holistically as a system rather than individually. Consequently, this work develops a system of systems community typology from national data describing types of factor value combinations within a region. This paper presents a method of integrating multifactorial community data using a clustering based method to determine holistic system of systems community typologies.