Systems-Theoretic Concept Design: An Intent Model for Early Concept Generation

Abstract

The complexity of engineered systems has grown leaps and bounds over the last forty years. One of the main challenges in modern engineering is managing this complexity, particularly as the pace of technological change continues to accelerate across industries. While most systems professionals agree, a viable early design concept is crucial to meeting stakeholders' needs and successfully scoping a development program, traditional early concept generation approaches focus on a design-first approach, often glossing over an analysis of system intent and a synthesis of system goals and objectives. This tendency leads to an early focus on low-level, highly-granular design activities that focus on advanced technologies as design components instead of on the high-level policy or desired emergence that the new system is being designed to achieve. To combat these shortcomings, this paper introduces a new framework for conceptualizing an early design for novel, complex systems in aerospace and defense that are employed as part of a portfolio-of-systems in an attempt to achieve a high-level policy or portfolio-level capability. It outlines an intent model for framing a new system's contribution to a portfolio-level capability, and it posits a framework for delivering a new model for early design concepts while providing a foundation to extend system-theoretic hazard and security analysis techniques to systematically analyze safety and security engineering challenges for the designs in the earliest possible phase of their lifecycle.