NATO Lecture Series on Systems of Systems Engineering for NATO Defence Applications

The last week two lectures of the NATO Lecture Series on Systems-of-Systems for NATO Defence Applications were held in Mannheim and Sofia. These two sessions were preceded by a first one end of January in Lisbon. One of the four lecturers was me. The other three are well established authorities in the domain of systems-of-systems (SoS).

Judith Dahmann from the Mitre Corporation is co-chairing the INCOSE Systems-of-Systems Working Group. Judith has a long history of being involved in systems engineering. For example, she has a leading role for establishing and maintaining the US DoD Guide for Systems Engineering of Systems-of-Systems. Peter Brook has an equivalent level of exceptional experience from senior technical and management roles in the UK Defence Research and Development Community dealing with subjects like MoDAF, the UK’s Ministry of Defence Architecture Framework, and enterprise systems engineering. Lecture Series Director was Michael Henshaw who is Professor of Systems Engineering and Head of the System Division at Loughborough University, UK.

In comparison to these distinguished SoS experts, I see much more equivalence of SoS engineering with plain systems engineering. In earlier issues of the INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook up to Version 3.1, a comparison was made between an aircraft and a digital photo camera. It was claimed that one of these products would be a system while the other would be a system-of-systems. From a generalised systems engineering viewpoint, both products have in common that there is a certain product-specific value generation depth with relying otherwise on many technologies and products available in a market driven economy. Of course, the product-specific value generation depth for an innovative aircraft for a special purpose may capture more architectural levels, and may demand an even more risk-oriented management approach. But does this really justify a clear distinction between a system and a system-of-systems? The fact that the digital photo camera was anticipated as a system-of-systems and the aircraft as a plain system was not suited to alleviate my scepticism.

So far, I understood the claim for SoS as a further example of a reasoning pattern to compare a new idea with something called traditional systems engineering. In this reasoning pattern, traditional systems engineering takes the role of something inferior with shortfalls easily understandable when applying some common sense. Throughout my professional career, this reasoning pattern has been used and is used frequently in the context of

• requirements engineering in the eighties of the last century,
• system architecting in the nineties of the last century,
• systems-of-systems in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and
• model-based systems engineering since the first decade of the twenty-first century.

I have just one little concern regarding this reasoning pattern: I have never seen the so-called traditional systems engineering at work in practice. Although it happened that people with too simplistic views about systems engineering entered systems engineering functions, those views rarely survived, at least when a programme after some crises reached its catharsis in being accomplished successfully - neglecting budget overspending and significant milestone delays, of course.

The invitation to participate as a lecturer on systems-of-systems was a good opportunity to analyse the particular aspects that promoters of SoS engineering are considering as specific to SoS further. The following two questions guided me throughout my investigation:

• In which context the claim for a specific SoS engineering has emerged?
• What is annoying in the state of the art of systems engineering to the promoters of SoS engineering?

SoS engineering emerged in the context of information technology permeating military leadership capabilities. Before, military leadership employed over centuries some simple communication means like visual and aural signalling, carrier pigeons and telephones. Military leadership principles in their essence were based on people and processes.

With the advent of information technology, new opportunities for military leadership capabilities emerged. When this was recognised, it was a common practice in systems engineering to define system architectures with distinct terminology to designate particular architectural levels. The weapons procured were designated as systems. As the operational scenarios come on top of the systems, the term system-of-systems was a natural choice. With generalising systems engineering and applying it offside the aerospace and defence domains, the designation of specific architectural levels by specific terms is fading. However, standards like IEEE 1220 still stick to such schemes in the current issue. ISO 15288 has abandoned this practice in favour of a recursive terminological scheme. Obviously, this shift had little impact on the term system-of-systems.

Another historical trait is the result of the success of technologies developed originally for military purposes. Again information technologies are the most important example, but there are many others as well including the material sciences, sensor miniaturisation and more. Not at least, also systems engineering provides a set of process principles and methods necessary to apply the mix of technologies in off-military applications. For the procurement of military goods, this opened some opportunities, but led also to some concerns. The concerns were primarily related to the loss of the exclusive customer position. Suppliers started to seek opportunities with other customers. Depending on the success, they became somewhat reluctant to satisfy some still specific military needs.

On the other hand, plenty of opportunities arose to profit from a more market opportunistic approach to armament procurement. The promise was for faster, cheaper and better weapon system procurement compared to the previous green-field approach. William Perry, the US Secretary of Defence, had good reasons to announce in 1994 a new policy to consider commercial-off-the-shelve (COTS) equipment whenever possible. Unfortunately, the implementation of the new policy became widely restricted to the harmonisation of military standards with civil standards. Interface standards affecting information technology were considered to be of particular importance.

In other areas, the business-as-usual continued. In particular, a transformation of systems engineering did not happen. Systems engineering continued to concentrate on a green-field approach as the normal case in systems engineering. INCOSE did the first steps in 2004 fostering industrial outreach, but focussed more on attracting other industries to apply systems engineering than to transform systems engineering itself beyond improving specific systems engineering methods.

With these considerations, I was able to understand some concerns of the promoters of SoS engineering from which common interests could arise. For the lecture series, I prepared the demanded two papers. The first one is titled System Interfaces and System Interoperability in a System-of-Systems Context. It provides further details about the considerations outlined above. For the advance of systems engineering, two recommendations are elaborated:

• Systems engineering should consider all organisational workshare situations from green-field to pure market-opportunistic approaches
• Systems engineering should integrate a product taxonomy from COTS over COTS with options to development-on-demand products

The second paper is titled Architecting of Systems for Participation in Systems-of-Systems. As I still deny a wide gap between SoS engineering and plain systems engineering, the content mainly amplifies the need for managing the development flow according to the systems engineering value stream. Additional system life cycle considerations emphasise the role of enterprises that is addressed in systems engineering texts marginally only.

Thus prepared, I travelled to Lisbon on 30 January for the first lecture immediately after returning from the INCOSE International Workshop from Los Angeles. The interaction between us lecturers was an enjoyable experience. When we met again in Mannheim on 8 and 9 June, and in Sofia on 11 and 12 June, we further improved the mutual references in our presentations to make the relations better understandable to the audience. Discussions with the attendees of the lectures were challenging and intense. Perhaps, there may be a further lecture of this series in future.

By the way, the photograph shows the Officer’s Club where the Sofia lecture took place on the right.