Mission oriented process for systems of systems engineering

Abstract

Systems of Systems (SoSs) encompass a group of distributed and independent systems, which work together to achieve a common goal. Their design and development is becoming increasingly important in wide variety of application domains, such as trade, transportation, health-care and military. Interesting approaches were proposed in Model-Based System Engineering (MBSE) to tackle with the design, development and complexity management of SoSs. We cite as example the systems engineering (SE) model-based methodologies and the architecting frameworks. However, several aspects of SoSs as the operational independence of constituent systems (CSs) and the uncertainty of the SoSs environment may create additional challenges. This thesis addresses the research gap by proposing a Mission Oriented Process for System of Systems Engineering (MOP-SoSE), based on the System Modeling Language (SysML), that comprises: (1) a mission conceptual model that includes the concepts characterizing SoS mission and their relationships, (2) an utilization process to provide guidance on the use of our approach, and (3) an multi-agents simulation (MAS) steps to assess gaps in mission performance and to improve the architecture. To illustrate our approach we conducted a case study on crowd management SoS.