Publication

This document is a summary of the work that was completed in Part 1 of the SERC Research Topic DO1/TTO2/0123 “Design and Development Tools for the Systems Engineering Experience Accelerator (SEEA)” supported by Strategic Initiatives, Office of the DASD (Systems Engineering). The tools development efforts fall into four major categories – simulation tools for building and testing simulation models that mimic the behavior and results of acquisition programs that focus on system design and development, experience building tools that provide the structure for such system engineering experiences and the events that occur in them, learning assessment tools to measure the efficacy of the experience, and EA infrastructure changes to support this work.

The simulation tool development project achieved its Part 1 objectives with the completion of the requirements and use cases for simulation tools, a review of existing tools to leverage, the development of a Prototype Sim Builder with GUI for model building and capability to manipulate sub-models for purposes of modularity and model archiving/curation and the development of a Prototype Sim Tuner that allows testing of model behavior drilled down to variables of interest. The Experience building tools development project achieved its Part 1 objectives with the completion of the requirements, a review of existing tools to leverage, and the use cases and prototypes for the Phase Editor, Event Editor and Artifact Integrator. Progress was achieved in the learning tools area with a literature search, the exploration of an initial concept and the identification of data to be captured by the Experience Accelerator.

A successful demonstration of the tools has been given to the sponsor. The tools are now at the stage where they are ready to be evaluated by external users for their use in Experience and Simulation development. An iterative development approach was quite successful at providing incremental functionality that was reviewed with its potential users throughout the research effort, prioritizing the most important features and delivering working prototypes throughout the effort. This approach will be continued in Part 2 of this research program.