A candidate functional architecture design for the detection and monitoring process of a counterdrug joint task force

Abstract

The Counterdrug Joint Task Force (JTF) represents an organizational environment that demonstrates requirements needed by most joint task forces. The nature of a JTF is that of a temporary organization established from many organizations to accomplish a specific task. Once this task is completed the different organizational elements return to their previous command structure. By designing the JTF using a systems engineering approach of top down decomposition, a format for the baseline requirements can be established. This decomposition format can be applied to generate other JTFs or re-applied to existing JTFs to verify systems requirements compliance. This thesis conducts a breadth-first examination of the Counterdrug JTF detection and monitoring process. Systems engineering software using IDEFO facilitates this design and is demonstrated in this thesis. A detailed analysis is then conducted for the data fusion and decision support sub-functions of the detection and monitoring process. The development of an alternative candidate architecture provides a different perspective to accomplishing top level system requirements. Designing a functional architecture using systems engineering tools enhance the performance of a JTF and can assist in the creation of future similar organizations