Operational Scenarios Identification and Prioritization in Systems of Systems: A Method and an Experience Report in the Defense Domain

Abstract

Military systems play a crucial role in the defense of a country. They are often interconnected to monitor the frontiers, increase the national sovereignty, and interoperate to offer a unified control of the entire territory. These alliances of systems are currently known as systems of systems (SoS). During the last years, software has been increasingly embedded in those systems to increase their precision. Besides, multiple cyber-physical systems have also been associated to interoperate in the context of SoS, bringing novel challenges related to the conception of those systems, in particular (i) how to elicit systems’ requirements and make them coexist in the same large-scale system, (ii) how to coexist competing requirements, (iii) how to support the distributed development of constituent systems and interoperability links, (iv) how to capture their conceptual operation in a unified document to exploit their functionalities in a fruitful manner, and (v) how to make the SoS cohesive, exploiting their functionalities and creating emergent behaviors to foster the national security. Given those gaps and challenges, this paper reports an experience of a real project carried out in a real Department of Defense, particularly in the navy’s context, besides externalizing a method called OSW to support the ConOps documents in SoS engineering projects. We report the conception of a SoS for defense and maritime surveillance, focusing on the concept of operations (ConOps) of that systems, the challenges faced, and the method established. We claim that this report contributes to the engineering of defense SoS since it provides a panorama of SoS conception, besides presenting solutions that can be replicated in other projects to be carried out worldwide, contributing thus for the advance of SoS research in that domain.