Mission and Capability Engineering for Systems-of-Systems

Systems-of-systems (SoS) describe situations where a set of independent constituent systems (CS) collaborate to reach some higher-level objectives. This is an area of increasing importance in the digital transformation of society, where more and more systems get interconnected. The objective of SoS engineering is to ensure that the collaboration among the CS provides an emergent set of capabilities. These capabilities can be called upon to carry out concrete operational missions to reach the objectives of the SoS owners. A challenge is that there is today a lack of good methods for modeling SoS capabilities and missions and also a lack of support for designing them.

This project addresses those challenges by investigating ways of modeling and using those models for design space exploration. As a first step, a synthesis is made of the current best practice, and with this as a basis a core ontology for SoS capabilities and missions is developed. This core ontology is then extended for two specific application domains, namely aerospace and construction. Using these ontology-based modeling techniques, the project studies ways of supporting SoS engineering through design space exploration. The dimensions of this include what CS are needed in the SoS; what capabilities they need to offer; how to form constellations of CS to perform a particular mission; and how to deal with evolution of the SoS.

The project is carried out in collaboration with SAAB Aeronautics and Volvo Construction Equipment. 

[Show all publications]

The Capability Concept in the Context of Systems of Systems: A Systematic Literature Review (Oct 2022)
Joyce Martin, Jakob Axelsson, Jan Carlson, Jagadish Suryadevara
8th International Symposium on Systems Engineerging (ISSE 2022)

On the Concepts of Capability and Constituent System Independence in Systems-of-Systems (Aug 2022)
Jakob Axelsson, Pontus Svenson
17th IEEE International Conference on System of Systems Engineering (SoSE2022)