Systems Engineering Methods for Validation and Verification of Changes to Legacy Fielded Systems

Life Cycle Systems Engineering is an iterative process which relies on feedback loops from the operational phase to facilitate continuous system improvement tasks so that systems stay relevant in changing operational environments. In the aerospace defense industry, real world operational data can be used as feedback to identify impacts to the system unrelated to the physical product. Operational data includes both physical system performance metrics, as well as performance of all the supporting non-product related system characteristics called operational feasibility elements. Operational feasibility elements such as processes, people, training, supportability, and maintainability play a significant role in overall system performance. Operational data can be used to inform the next iteration of the systems engineering process and enables updates to policy/processes, models, simulations, and analyses in addition to more common physical product updates. Failure to utilize operational data as validation of system performance may result in significant gaps understanding why system failure occurs, thus rendering technical solutions inadequate to resolve performance issues since the true root cause of the enterprise system failure is unknown.