Conceptual, Mathematical, and Analytical Foundations for Mission Engineering and System of Systems Analysis

Mission engineering (ME) is an emerging approach to designing and analyzing configurations of system-of-systems (SoS) for accomplishing one or more missions. ME seeks to flexibly leverage SoS capabilities and dynamically adapt their configuration to meet evolving mission needs. SoS configurations today, however, remain static and are carefully designed to accomplish a mission. The problem we address in this article is developing modeling and analysis techniques for flexible integration and adaptive selection of potential SoS configurations to achieve multiple missions with an overarching agility in the execution space. We propose a foundational framework for ME, complete with semantics and grammar to represent the ME design space (MEDS), along with a set of logical and mathematical modeling approaches that lends the MEDS to robust SoS analytical methods. Specifically, the framework proposes development of a mission-focused ontology and domain-specific language to enable consistent semantic representation of MEDS, which is then logically evaluated for spatial and temporal consistency in forming SoS configurations using set-based design principles and Allen's interval algebra. The resulting feasible SoS configurations are then evaluated for mission success using graph theory and multiattribute utility theory. The application of the framework is demonstrated on a simplified and notional sense-decide-effect problem for flexibly accomplishing multiple missions with SoS.