SERC research team released Technical Report SERC-2018-TR-103 for Research Task 170 “Transforming Systems Engineering through Model-Centric Engineering”on February 28, 2018. Questions may be addressed to Principal Investigator Dr. Mark Blackburn as well as other researchers.
Executive Summary:
This is the final technical report of the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) research task RT170. This research task (RT) addresses research needs extending prior efforts under RT-48/118/141/157 that informed us that Model-Centric Engineering1 (MCE) is in use and adoption seems to be accelerating. Model-centric engineering can be characterized as an overarching digital engineering approach that integrates different model types with simulations, surrogates, systems and components at different levels of abstraction and fidelity across disciplines throughout the lifecycle. Industry is trending towards more integration of computational capabilities, models, software, hardware, platforms, and humans-in-the-loop. The integrated perspectives provide cross-domain views for rapid
system level analysis allowing engineers from various disciplines using dynamic models and surrogates to support continuous and often virtual verification and validation for tradespace decisions in the face of changing mission needs.
NAVAIR senior leadership confirmed in late 2015 that NAVAIR must move quickly to keep pace with the other organizations that have adopted MCE and who continue to evolve at an accelerating pace enabled by the advances in computational and modeling technologies, and improved methods. In March of 2016, there was a Change of Command at AIR 4.0 (Research and Engineering) and NAVAIR leadership decided to accelerate the Systems Engineering Transformation (SET). During 2017 there was strategic planning to characterize the Functional Areas of the SET Execution Framework. One of those functional areas is the SET Research that is discussed in this report. This research provides analyses into NAVAIR enterprise capability, and builds on efforts for cross-domain model integration, model integrity, ontologies, semantic web technologies, multi-physics modeling, and model visualization that extend RT157 research under RT-170 to address the evolving SET needs and priorities of SET.
A key decision by NAVAIR leadership in 2017 was to conduct a surrogate pilot as reflected in Figure 1. The aspects of this research task are blended into the surrogate pilot. The surrogate pilot is using experiments to simulate the execution of the new SET Framework, shown in Figure 2. The first phase of the SET Surrogate Pilot addresses the following mission, goals and objectives:
- Mission: Collaboration between Government and Industry in Model-based Acquisition under SET Framework
- Goal: Execute SET Framework to Assess, Refine, and Understand a New Paradigm for Collaboration in Authoritative Source of Truth (AST)
- Objectives (non-exhaustive):
- Formalize experiments to answer questions about executing SET framework using Surrogate Contractor (SC)
- ”Government team” creates mission, system (& other) models, “generates specification/Request For Proposal,” and provides acquisition models to SC as Government Furnished Information (GFI)
- SC refines the GFI to make corrections and add innovations with physical allocation views with an multi-physics-based Initial Balanced Design
- Simulate continuous virtual reviews and derive new objective measures for assessing maturing design in AST
- Demonstrate visualizations for real-time collaboration in AST
- Demonstrate and document methods applied
- Investigate challenging areas and research topics in series of pilots
Figure 1. SE Transformation “Roll out” Strategy
