The development of an aggregated system consisting of autonomously developed components is usually implemented as a self-contained unit. If such an aggregation is understood as a system of systems (SoS) that communicates via interfaces with its autonomous subsystems and components, the interfaces and communication exchange should play a central role in the architectural design. In fact, complete and exact interface specifications simplify loose coupling of independent systems into an aggregation. Since an SoS consists of variant and non-variant subsystems, the main challenge in SoS development is the identification of all true variants and its deviating attributes within an SoS. If the system variants are identified at an early stage of the development process, redundant work in the interface design can be substantially reduced. This paper presents an efficient method to identify SoS variants with regard to life cycle management and it shows how to configure a variant-oriented SoS with a standardized communication interface. For the development, the forward-looking model-based systems engineering approach is recommended to create executable specification parts and to detect errors early on through simulations.