Systems of Systems consist of collections of (possibly independent, pre-existing, geographically distributed and following their own goals) constituent systems whose behaviours are coordinated to provide services and additional value with respect to their original intended operations. This kind of entities offer severe technical, management, and political challenges as witnessed by energy blackouts such as the one experienced by Italy in 2003 and the emergency management disaster in response to the hurricane Katrina in 2005. DANSE aims at developing new approaches to the design and management of the operation of SoS based on: advanced methodologies based on a new evolutionary, adaptive and iterative SoS life-cycle model; semantically sound models based on the notion of contracts; innovative architectures that provide the infrastructure to allow the dynamic affiliation of components so that the behaviour of the ensemble is not disturbed; novel supporting tools for analysis, simulation, and optimization; organized in an integrated environment. DANSE will develop training material and classes that help advance the knowledge base of European industry and government to allow the creation of new services and to substantially improve existing ones to levels of efficiency that are unthinkable today. DANSE includes industrial representatives with focus on Aerospace and Land systems and Automotive, leading tools and framework provider in the system space and top European research institutes in system engineering. The partners have a deep interest in the outcome of the research and are eager to deploy them as soon as they become available. Three Test Cases – Air Traffic Management, Autonomous Ground Transport and Integrated Water Treatment and Supply-- which are real industrial problems planned for commercial development, have been identified to validate DANSE approach. The last case is a full-fledged industrial project used for the demonstration of the DANSE paradigm.