Publication

During Phase 6, the Systems Qualities Ontology, Tradespace, and Affordability (SQOTA) team has made significant progress, not only in research results, but also in their application and support of DoD organizations and FFRDCs. Several team members are addressing coordinated control of multiple autonomous vehicles: Wayne State with TARDEC for ground vehicles; Penn State with the Navy for sea vehicles; AFIT and NPS for Air Force and Navy swarms of airborne drones, also in collaboration with USC’s Azad Madni’s Hidden Markov Model-based machine learning capability for dealing with uncertainties in the control of swarms of airborne drones. Georgia Tech continues to extend its versatile model-based systems engineering toolset in support of Army, Navy, and Marine Corps systems engineering and tradespace analysis efforts, and is extending its capabilities to address security tradespace analysis.

USC’s Systems Qualities Ontology is being used to enable tradespace analysis between other system qualities (SQs) and Maintainability, which supports not only Total Ownership Cost (TOC) and Changeability, but also Dependability in terms of reducing Mean Time To Repair. USC is also developing, applying, evaluating, and extending a big-data analysis toolset called Systems Qualities Understanding through Analysis of Abundant Data (SQUAAD), which has been used to analyze a Navy Safety tradespace analysis application. USC is also coordinating its Maintainability ontology with MIT’s Changeability semantic ontology, and with U.Virginia’s big-data analysis capabilities. The USC Ontology has also been used to clarify the quagmire of alternative definitions of Resilience, in concert with Aerospace Corp’s March 2018 Ground Systems Architecture Workshop, and is preparing to extend its SQUAAD capabilities to address Security and Interoperability tradespace analysis.

In the next-generation cost modeling area, Phase 6 included a collaboration of NPS and USC with the Naval Center for Cost Analysis in addressing early cost analysis of agile systems developments. USC has also completed an initial calibration of the COSYSMO 3.0 upgrade in a team effort with NPS and several aerospace companies, including effects of systems engineering artifact reuse, and is exploring cost estimation of security levels in concert with the Software Engineering Institute.

This report summarizes and provides examples of the overall SQOTA Phase 6 results by team member organizations in alphabetical order.