As a network of interacting elements, cyber-physical systems (CPS) provide tremendous opportunities to advance system adaptability, flexibility and autonomy. However, they also present extremely complex and unique safety, security and reliability risks. The Department of Defense is seeking methods to deliver and support trusted systems and manage risks associated with mission-critical functionality. Technical thought leaders have discussed the need to address 10:1 more complex systems with 10:1 reduction in effort, using people from a 10:1 larger community than the “systems expert” group. This paper briefly summarizes the approach of Pattern-Based Systems Engineering (PBSE), which leverages the power of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) to rapidly deliver these benefits to the larger systems community. This order-of-magnitude improvement is especially necessary to address the rapidly increasing complexity of today’s and future cyber-physical systems. While applying PBSE expresses many patterns, this paper introduces the Embedded Intelligence (EI) Pattern, particularly relevant to cyber-physical systems such as autonomous ground vehicles.