Archives for April 2022
The SERC Adds New Talent to the Research Council
Girth, Head and Schooner Join the Research Council to Broaden Areas of Expertise
The Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) is pleased to welcome three new members of the Research Council: Amanda Girth, Ph.D., Larry Head, Ph.D., and Steven Schooner, Esq. These members are subject matter experts in their respective areas of research, teaching and practice. The recent establishment of the Acquisition Innovation Research Center (AIRC) requires a broadening of expertise represented on the research council to include areas such as policy, law, business and economics, infrastructure, data sciences, social sciences and more. These new members represent that expansion and the broadening of the network. Their guidance will lead to further interdisciplinary advances that distinguish the importance and prominence of the SERC, and the AIRC.
Reflecting on the role of research council members, Dinesh Verma, Executive Director, SERC and AIRC, said, “Both the Systems Engineering Research Center and the Acquisition Innovation Research Center were established with a view towards nucleating and nurturing a network of prominent faculty and researchers to support the engineering and acquisition of increasingly complex systems and solutions by the U.S. Government in general, and the Department of Defense in particular. This strategic intent requires the active engagement of premier faculty members who are simultaneously collaborative and able to work across disciplinary boundaries on complex problems. Faculty on the Research Council continue to exemplify these attributes.”
Amanda Girth, Associate Professor, Director of Washington Studies in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University, was recently appointed as an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (2021-2023). She is involved with a number of professional associations and serves on the editorial board for Perspectives on Public Management & Governance. Dr. Girth researches implementation issues and accountability challenges in third-party governance. She studies the strategies that front-line public managers utilize to manage their contracts, contract markets and various constituencies. She examines how public managers design and implement performance incentives to motivate contractor behavior. She also analyzes inclusion policies that target underrepresented groups in order to understand the impact of such acquisition policies on purchasing agencies and suppliers.
Larry Head is a Professor of Systems and Industrial Engineering at the University of Arizona. He currently serves on the Arizona Governor’s Task Force for Self-Driving Vehicles, is a member of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Traffic Signal Systems Committee and the Intelligent Transportation Systems Committee, and a past member of the SAE DSRC Technical Committee. He is an Associate Editor of Transportation Research – Part C. He is a member of TRB, SAE, ASEE, INFORMS, IISE, and IEEE. Dr. Head has over 30 years of academic and industry experience related to systems engineering, engineering management, adaptive traffic signal control and signal priority, and connected and automated vehicle systems. He has served as Interim Dean of the College of Engineering, Interim Vice Provost for Online Learning, Director of the Transportation Research Institute, and Department Head of the Systems and Industrial Engineering Department at the University of Arizona.
Steven Schooner is the Nash & Cibinic Professor of Government Procurement Law at the George Washington University Law School. He is a fellow of the National Contract Management Association, a certified professional contracts manager (CPCM), and recipient of the Charles A. Dana Distinguished Service Award. Professor Schooner is the faculty adviser to the ABA’s Public Contract Law Journal and serves on the Procurement Round Table and the advisory board of the Government Contractor. Professor Schooner’s scholarship focuses primarily upon federal government contract law and public procurement policy. Before joining GWU faculty in 1998, Professor Schooner was the associate administrator for procurement law and legislation at the Office of Federal Procurement Policy in the Office of Management and Budget. He previously served as a trial and appellate attorney in the Commercial Litigation Branch of the Department of Justice. Professor Schooner also practiced with private law firms and, as an active duty Army judge advocate, served as a commissioner at the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals. Until his retirement as an Army Reserve officer, he was an adjunct professor in the Contract and Fiscal Law Department of the Judge Advocate General’s School of the Army.
Stevens, SERC and INCOSE Examine the Impacts of Work-at-Home Policies
“Considering the length of work-from-home policies in multiple sectors and industries, many with no returning plan, the results from this work underscore the necessity of further research on remote work. The human resource management field and its ability to address the positive and negative aspects of remote work are essential to explore and to establish better conditions and resources for employees.”
Impacts of work-at-home policies on systems engineers and the general population
When the Covid-19 pandemic was declared and many employees were allowed to work at home, the advantages and disadvantages of remote work quickly became apparent. Many factors contributed to the complexity of what employees and their employers experienced: everything from distractions at home (often due to lack of daycare or in-person school attendance), changes to teamwork and lack of experience with technologies for team collaboration, limited or no access to software, hardware, or secured data platforms, to the sudden absence of unplanned conversations at the office where critical knowledge is often shared. In addition, the pandemic has accelerated existing trends, such as flexible workspaces, decreased work-related travel, and greater use of automation and e-commerce.
A team from the Stevens Institute of Technology School of Systems and Enterprises, and the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) gathered survey data in the early months of the pandemic and again one year later from the systems engineering (SE) community, and Twitter data from the general population during those periods. Their research, published in Systems Engineering, presents a framework that parses out the factors that rated positively or negatively during work-at-home experiences. The findings are relevant to employers and human resource departments as they address work-at-home policies and issues and work to better understand how to retain talent, generate innovation and maintain productivity.
Lead author and SERC Principal Investigator Jose Ramirez-Marquez and co-authors: Kara Pepe, Dinesh Verma, Maria Jose Perez-Pereda, and Pouria Babvey present the purpose and design of the study in the article:
- Provide insights into how work-at-home policies impacted the SE community at different timeframes of implementation;
- Apply text analysis techniques (i.e., topic modeling and sentiment analysis) to social media data to identify the needs and limitations of work-at-home arrangements;
- Present the analysis of different types of questions in a survey, including open-answer questions with topic detection techniques;
- Compare the behavioral changes from the beginning of the pandemic and the behavioral changes one year later; and
- Compare, leverage, and contrast the responses of the SE community with that of other population cohorts.
“The use of social media significantly increased during the early stages of the pandemic providing a rich source of information with respect to community response to and effects of work at home policies. By identifying social media data related to these topics we were able to compare the systems engineering community against the general population and to understand the narrative of these communities,” said Ramirez-Marquez.
The team’s research and approach to understand employees’ responses to work environment changes is critical, particularly the shift to remote work during the pandemic. The McKinsey report on Agility in the time of COVID-19 points out that “Before the coming of COVID-19, business and technological forces already required organizations to manage change and make decisions more quickly than ever before. The pandemic has vastly intensified those needs. Never have companies of all sizes felt so much pressure to make their business models fit changing requirements. And the need for speed won’t be temporary—digitization, globalization, automation, analytics, and the other forces of change will go on accelerating too.”
This trend will demand employees to have the competencies to collaborate effectively in the digital environment, and for employers to understand and respond to the factors that influence employee satisfaction, and how to provide the required conditions for effective communication, collaboration, and innovation.
Pepe noted, “It was important and timely for the SERC to look at the impact work from home was having on the broad SE community. It will continue to impact our workforce across academia, government and industry and something we’re going to have a continued and growing interest in understanding further.”
Cyber-Physical-Human Testbed to Support Research and Experimentation
Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) has been a trend in systems engineering for several years and has grown in relevance in recent years. In response, the US Department of Defense (DoD) has expanded its work on MBSE to include a holistic view of what is needed to perform truly digital engineering. There are many tools that support digital engineering and MBSE, and the benefits can be measured and documented, but there has been an absence of an overarching framework to pull the tools together and transfer experience and knowledge from one project to the next in a coherent way. As a result, researchers and project teams often must find their own way while implementing MBSE research. The Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)) tasked the SERC with addressing some of these challenges head on.
Dr. Azad Madni, University of Southern California (USC), led the SERC research focused on building a digital testbed to support the adoption and implementation of MBSE as aligned with DoD strategy. The objective was to provide a holistic environment that supports the full lifecycle of an engineered system, while providing a “toolkit” and an information repository for future projects.
The team built a testbed that has facilities for modeling, prototyping, verifying and validating models. Within this context, a “testbed” is the set of functions needed to support demonstration and integration of and experimentation with MBSE tools. The testbed allows researchers to integrate virtual prototypes with physical systems – in other words, it connects digital twins with their physical counterparts. Dr. Madni explained, “We created an instrumented framework within which you can do modeling, verification, exploration of what ifs, collect data, and get better informed. This is stored in a repository that can feed information into future projects. The testbed is a starting kit of different models and algorithms tying digital and physical twins so research teams can hit the ground running.”
Dr. Madni’s team used a scenario of interest to the US Air Force as an illustrative example to convey the capabilities of the testbed. The scenario is concerned with optimizing the efficacy of perimeter protection of a just-landed aircraft through a combination of building-mounted sensors and a team of UAVs. The testbed allows exploration of scenario variations and provides insight into how well the coverage is working, where there is loss of coverage due to loss of a resource, what could be done to restore coverage autonomously, and what scenario conditions would require a human in the loop to restore coverage. Such experiments are helped by the infrastructure of the testbed, which includes model libraries, algorithms, an ontology – or pre-defined classification structure – and a flexible dashboard for visualization and monitoring of scenario progress. This dashboard capability improves users’ ability to utilize the dashboard quickly. The figure below highlights the ontology for the testbed and also gives insights into its structure.
The testbed has been disseminated to both universities and industry and is available for SERC researchers. As Dr. Madni stated, “People are working in a collaborative environment now. They need to be able to organize and share models, scenarios, and results for various scenario conditions. What better way than to have a testbed?”
For more information about the “Adaptive Cyber-Physical-Human Systems Testbed” project, please contact Dr. Madni.
Additional resources:
- MBSE Testbed for Rapid, Cost-Effective Prototyping and Evaluation of System Modeling Approaches
- Toward a MBSE Research Testbed: Prototype Implementation and Lessons Learned
- Digital-Twin Enabled Experimentation Testbed for MBSE
- Digital Twin-enabled MBSE Testbed for Prototyping and Evaluating Aerospace Systems: Lessons Learned
- Leveraging Digital Twin Technology in Model-Based Systems Engineering
Under Leadership of Dir. Melinda Reed, Resilient Systems Directorate Updates CRWS-BoK
The threat of cyber-attacks and cyber warfare is greater now than it has ever been. From information systems to critical infrastructures, the ability to withstand, recover and continue operations in the face of cyber-attacks is top of mind across government, industry and civil society. The Department of Defense (DoD) has dedicated extensive resources to the development of knowledge in secure cyber-resilient engineering; one of these resources is the Cyber Resilient Weapon Systems Body of Knowledge (CRWS-BoK). The CRWS-BoK is a curated collection of specialized knowledge designed to advance the engineering of cyber resilient weapon systems. Users include engineers and researchers from academia, the government and industry.
Under the leadership of Melinda Reed, Director for Resilient Systems (RS) in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)) Office of Strategic Technology Protection Exploitation (STP&E), the CRWS-BoK is maintained and updated on a regular basis. On February 18, 2022 the DoD announced the release of the Cyber Resilient Weapon Systems Body of Knowledge (CRWS-BoK) Portal Version 1.3. The CRWS-BoK provides resources to protect system elements through cyber resilient engineering organized under topic areas that include technology, data and information, mission and system function. The Resilient Systems (RS) Directorate also partners with science and technology (S&T) professionals to foster assured resilient missions, systems, and components.
Ms. Reed will be presenting on Secure Cyber Resilient Engineering (SCRE) at the upcoming SERC Talk on June 15th. Ms. Reed brings a wealth of engineering and technical experience; serving as the principal OUSD(R&E) executive for policy, guidance, education, and methods to ensure defense systems perform free of known vulnerabilities and exploitation. Her responsibilities include overseeing DoD initiatives in secure cyber resilient engineering; program protection; hardware, software, and system assurance; supply chain risk management; design for exportability; anti-tamper; and controlled technical information. Ms. Reed is a recipient of the Under Secretary of Defense (Acquisition, Technology & Logistics) Award for Excellence and the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Research, Development and Acquisition) Acquisition Excellence Award. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Oregon State University.