Mission and Capability Engineering for Systems-of-Systems

Background

Systems-of-systems (SoS) describe situations where a set of independent constituent systems (CS) collaborate to reach some higher-level objectives. This is an area of increasing importance in the digital transformation of society, where more and more systems get interconnected. One reason for this is that individual products have now reached a level of sophistication that makes further improvement difficult. Instead, it becomes necessary to improve the way the products interact with others in a larger context. The objective of SoS engineering is to ensure that the collaboration among the CS provides an emergent set of capabilities. These capabilities can be called upon to carry out concrete operational missions to reach the objectives of the SoS owners. A challenge is that there is today a lack of good methods for modeling SoS capabilities and missions and also a lack of support for designing them.

Purpose

The purpose of this project is to study how system developers can design their products to have capabilities that make them effective in an SoS context, and how SoS designers can compose the available elements, called constituent systems (CS), as efficiently as possible to achieve a particular mission.

Goals

To reach its purpose, the project will address two main goals:

• Improve current practices in modeling missions and capabilities
• Provide tools that support developers in exploring the SoS design space.

Activities

This project will address the challenges related to systems-of-systems (SoS) capabilities and missions by investigating ways of modeling and using those models for design space exploration. As a first step, a synthesis will be made of the current best practice, and with this as a basis a core ontology for SoS capabilities and missions will be developed. This core ontology will then be extended for two specific application domains, namely aerospace and construction. Using these modeling techniques, the project will study ways of supporting SoS engineering through design space exploration. The dimensions of this include what CS are needed in the SoS; what capabilities they need to offer; how to form constellations of CS to perform a particular mission; and how to deal with evolution of the SoS.