Functional flow and event-driven methods for predicting system performance

Abstract

As technology continues to advance at an increasingly rapid pace and systems become more complex, evolving into systems of systems, the discipline of systems engineering will become a more important part of the entire system lifecycle. The scope of this thesis is to apply model-based system engineering principles to the system architecture of a system of systems, and to utilize behavior modeling capabilities to conduct an analysis of alternatives for a realistic design reference mission; the work in this thesis is based around a search and rescue mission. Two models of the search and rescue system of systems were prepared utilizing two model-based system engineering approaches and tools. For functional flow the Innoslate tool (from Spec Innovations) was used, and for event-driven the Monterey Phoenix Analyzer tool (from Naval Postgraduate School) was utilized. The application of both approaches illustrated how difficult it is to model a system of systems, and this examination uncovered opportunities to improve both approaches. The ability to allow an asset to asynchronously proceed through a scenario would improve the flexibility of Innoslate. To improve the utility of Monterey Phoenix Analyzer for analyses of alternatives, the capability to automatically input the characteristics for assets should be incorporated.