Enabling Mission Engineering through a Reusable Digital Engineering Environment

Mission engineering is the deliberate organization and integration of a system of systems (SoS) to achieve a particular goal or mission. As such, it often requires the consideration of many alternative configurations of independent constituent systems and organizations over a diverse set of operating contexts with a focus on the achievement of desired mission outcomes. While digital engineering approaches and tools would seem to be a natural means to aid engineers in managing the associated complexity, mission engineering poses several challenges to its successful application. Among these challenges are the diversity of SoS constituents, complex system behaviors and interactions, and multiple relevant levels of abstraction. The direct consequence is that each mission may require a different characterization of the SoS architecture and corresponding set of simulation models. This paper presents an approach developed at the MITRE Corporation to partially mitigate these challenges by constructing a reusable digital engineering environment based on a shared modeling framework. The digital engineering environment leverages a multi-layered SysML architecture model that evolved through its application to multiple, real-world mission engineering efforts. The layered structure enables the reuse and rapid construction of new mission architectures and facilitates the coordination of multiple analysis efforts using different simulation tools.