Projects

This project explores business and technical domains to support the efficient development and sustainment of mission systems. The research goal is to enable Army sponsors to address MOSA business concerns through couplings with traditional systems engineering processes to achieve functional and performance needs. Managed architectures ensure components and systems are aligned to overarching business and technical objectives. By following the CAS, programs will be able to realize and meet MOSA requirements. This research will aid in the determination of the specific business and technical objectives and the appropriate system modularity and key interface specifications needed to successfully implement a MOSA. Many domains are under investigation and insight from this research will contribute significantly to the systems architecture body of knowledge.

Like the great architects of the classical world, Systems Engineering is a discipline reliant on heuristics and experience. For those builders, whose work was often as spectacular as it was teetering on the verge of disaster, the towering skyscrapers and miles long bridges of the modern world were beyond their ability to execute. To reach those literal heights, an underlying mathematical understanding of structural problems was needed, an understanding that is still largely absent in Systems Engineering. Category Theory represents a promising avenue to develop this formalism. The categorical concepts of objects and mappings translate well to the systems abstractions of components, requirements, flows (energy, material, and information), and relationships, to list a few. With partners at NASA, NIST, and AFRL, the goal is to develop, through Category Theory, the fundamental axioms that drive Systems Engineering and bring the discipline to its next stage of development.

While failure case studies, such as close call reports and mishap investigations, provide detailed information about what went wrong in projects, aggregating findings from the case studies can be a challenge. Often knowledge of a failure is limited to those investigating the failure, rather than being shared organizationally. This study focuses on applying a failure classification scheme to failure case studies to identify the challenges of classifying case study data. This study answers the following question: “What are the challenges of applying a failure classification scheme to case-study-types of data?”. In coordination with the NASA Office of the Chief Engineer (OCE), three UAH coders classified a NASA Mishap Investigation Board Report using a previously developed failure classification scheme. While some factors were commonly identified among the three coders, there was low inter-rater reliability, which suggests that there may be significant challenges to using failure classification schemes with this type of unstructured, natural language data. Future research will adapt the failure classification scheme as it is tested on other NASA case studies as well as different types of data. The ultimate goal of the study is to understand the factors that contribute to failures by incorporating failure classification into the modern practice of systems engineering to identify and minimize risk throughout all stages of project development.

This research focuses on the discovery of innovative yet practical strategies to realize affordability improvements in the RS-25 engine while maintaining the engine’s characteristic safety and reliability. The research is conducted from a systems perspective such that all costs are evaluated in a life cycle cost context, assuring that cost reductions in one area are not offset by associated cost increases in another area. The research addresses systems integration, both of technologies and processes into the engine and of the RS-25 into the SLS and exploration systems. Additionally, this project aims to learn how professionals associated with NASA and the aerospace community approach the concept of affordability and what factors influence their perceptions of aerospace product affordability.

While Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) has received much attention in recent years from systems engineers and engineering managers, few studies have examined community opinions on MBSE from literature. This research identifies and discusses previous studies on the justification of MBSE. The goal of this research is to understand how the systems engineering and engineering management communities perceive MBSE and what aspects of MBSE are valued. Over 1,900 quotes from 60 academic sources are coded to determine the attributes that describe MBSE positively, negatively, or neutrally. The metrics used to measure these attributes and the evidence are evaluated. Aspects of MBSE that are perceived to be positive include: verifiability, consistency, reasoning, and communication. Aspects of MBSE that are perceived to be negative include: approach understanding, cultural acceptance, and cost to implement. This research provides an understanding of perceived benefits and disbenefits in published literature that practitioners can use to conceptualize the value of MBSE in their own applications. On-going work is expanding the data to consider other SE approaches to compare what attributes and metrics may be unique to MBSE.