Overview: With emerging customer trends toward rapid product development programs, and strategic capability accelerators, the traditional 'above-the-line' (ATL) to 'below-the-line' (BTL) systems engineering divide is eroding. Blurring of these lines has heightened the need for primes to understand mission engineering principles, and achieve better horizontal and vertical information integration such that confidence in the mission-product fit can be developed, assessed and evolved with pace.
Context: Mission Engineering has traditionally been the purview of ‘above-the-line’ (ATL) systems engineering efforts, undertaken by a customer in eliciting their internal mission and operational needs. The mapping of specific missions and capability needs to new platforms, requires bridging of the operational and system lenses, which is beyond the scope of any one method or architecture framework.
Purpose: Developing a proactive understanding of the customers intended missions and concept of operations, via mission engineering, and achieving traceability from mission needs through to design is deemed a critical enabler for effective product development activities. Model-based systems engineering was proposed to help bridge this divide and provide a pattern for multi-project/program research and development.
Approach: Modelling and architectural themes across mission engineering, operational/service modelling and object-oriented systems modelling were analysed and mapped to derive a holistic metamodel, methodology and viewpoint set. The resultant method was applied to an internal product development program as a case study and means of validation.
Insights: The investment in proactive mission engineering and alignment is feasible and effective, albeit expensive and assumption driven. Clear articulation of missions, capability needs and customer investment priorities would provide a more robust basis for ‘proactive’ mission engineering and allow industry to deliver a more competitive set of products and capabilities. Mission modelling holds greatest value when used as the basis of program/portfolio approach of research and development, thus allowing for re-use of the mission modelling investment.