The 24-month T-AREA-SoS Support Action addresses ICT-2011.3.3, target outcome g) "to analyse international research agendas to prepare concrete joint R&D initiatives for international collaboration, particularly with the USA in the area of System of systems (SoS)". The concept for this proposal is to exploit the established networks of the participants and associates (based in EU and US) including the extant activities they lead within the IEEE and INCOSE in the area of SoS to explore and evolve SoS R& D themes and priorites for FP7/FP8 and other international programmes that will lead to outcomes that address societal needs, with exemplars across a wide variety of sectors including non-traditional aspects of Energy, Transport, and Production, using Engineering of SoS (i.e. SoSE) as a mainstream discipline for the management of large complex systems.It is a basic premise of this proposal that SoS engineering includes, as a central component, the consideration of societal needs and issues within the management of large, socially-significant system of systems. It is also understood that SoSE is an emerging discipline that deals with ultra large systems that include many heterogeneous systems that may be independently owned and/or operated, distributed, evolutionary in nature and which exhibit emergent behaviours.The outputs from this Support Action will be a strategic research agenda that will create the environment for the development of concrete research initiatives through which the EU and the US which will collaborate to enhance existing research programmes and set the scene for future programmes. These outputs will be supported by an analysis of the state of the art and high level definition of research requirements in SoSE, and a thesaurus to enable concepts to be shared across industrial sectors and technical disciplines.Through the creation of a SoSE research agenda commonly agreed by EU and US stakeholders with initiatives to be embedded in future FP7/FP8 programmes the aim of this proposal to increase European competitiveness in, and improve the societal impact of, the development and management of large complex systems in a range of sectors.