Mission and Capability Engineering for Systems-of-Systems

Status:

active

Start date:

2021-10-01

End date:

2024-09-30

Systems-of-systems (SoS) describe situations where a set of independent constituent systems (CS) collaborate to reach some higher-level objectives. This is an area of increasing importance in the digital transformation of society, where more and more systems get interconnected. The objective of SoS engineering is to ensure that the collaboration among the CS provides an emergent set of capabilities. These capabilities can be called upon to carry out concrete operational missions to reach the objectives of the SoS owners. A challenge is that there is today a lack of good methods for modeling SoS capabilities and missions and also a lack of support for designing them.

This project addresses those challenges by investigating ways of modeling and using those models for design space exploration. As a first step, a synthesis is made of the current best practice, and with this as a basis a core ontology for SoS capabilities and missions is developed. This core ontology is then extended for two specific application domains, namely aerospace and construction. Using these ontology-based modeling techniques, the project studies ways of supporting SoS engineering through design space exploration. The dimensions of this include what CS are needed in the SoS; what capabilities they need to offer; how to form constellations of CS to perform a particular mission; and how to deal with evolution of the SoS.

The project is carried out in collaboration with SAAB Aeronautics and Volvo Construction Equipment. 

PartnerType
Saab Industrial
Volvo Construction Equipment AB Industrial

Jakob Axelsson, Professor

Email: jakob.axelsson@mdu.se
Room: U1-062
Phone: +46-72-734 29 52