Virtual collaborative environments for Engineered Resilient Systems

Abstract

Past and current military conflicts have proven that an adversary will change tactics to gain an advantage over their opposition. In certain military circles this concept is known as “blowback”. The advantage gained is due to rendering the opposition's materiel and training inadequate. Given the timeframe required to field a new weapon system, the effects of “blowback” are a detriment to mission and campaign success. The most efficient and effective way to reduce the effects of “blowback” is to greatly reduce or compress the acquisition lifecycle timeframe. This can be accomplished by engineering and producing resilient systems. Current Systems Engineering tools, practices and environments are not adequate for realization of resilient systems. Therefore, there exists a need for a virtual collaborative environment that will host and integrate the required domain tools, allow the real-time virtual collaboration of all stakeholders (laboratories, engineers, program managers, configuration management, users, maintainers, contracts, finance, logistics and all levels of leadership), disseminate the right data at the right time to the right stakeholders and maintain and control the artifacts of the system under development or change.