High Reliability Organizations are organizations that have fewer than the average number of high-consequence accidents. “Heinrich’s Law” states that the industrial average of the ratio of high-consequence accidents to total recordable accidents is 1:330. This represents an average of one...
Systems engineers are routinely tasked with facilitating the delicate balance between cost, schedule, and technical performance in the acquisition of new technology. While techniques for assessing cost and schedule performance abound, the estimation and risk analysis of technical performance in...
This dissertation establishes a novel framework and the implementation steps necessary to guide the acceleration of economic growth through the transformation from a product-based orientation to co-created e-Services. Co-creation promotes the sharing of innovation in the development and delivery...
Traditionally, reliability growth models are used during development to project growth as the system proceeds through the Test-Analyze-And-Fix (TAAF) stages, and do not continue to be utilized once the system is fielded. In most cases, demonstrated reliability replaces predicted reliability at...
Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) allow operators to conduct high-risk military missions without putting humans in harm's way. The United States Department of Defense's (DoD) usage of UASs increased six-fold from 2005 to 2011, while the DoD UAS budget has increased four-fold during the same...
With increasing Internet connectivity and traffic volume, recent intrusion incidents have reemphasized the importance of network intrusion detection systems for combating increasingly sophisticated network attacks. Techniques such as pattern recognition and the data mining of network events are...
Modern systems are becoming exponentially more complex and interconnected, particularly in software-intensive systems. Department of Defense (DoD) mandates for net-centric capabilities have greatly complicated the challenges for testing new and legacy systems that are employed in a system of...
The electromagnetic spectrum is a crucial asset for wireless technology innovation and for the industry's economy. The significance of the telecommunications industry's capital expenditures increases with the spectrum acquisition value in its primary market due to the scarcity factor, which is...
In 2008, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) performed a study on 11 Department of Defense (DoD) programs and compared how requirements were developed between DoD and private industry. The study found that the DoD did not follow good Systems Engineering practices when developing...
Tracking maneuvering targets is an important but difficult problem. This problem occurs when tracking maneuvering boats or even people wandering around. If the target motion is linear and the measurement errors are Gaussian, then a Kalman filter provides the optimal estimates. However, since...
This dissertation introduces a new schedule performance approach for level-of-effort (LOE) tasks for use by systems engineers, engineering managers, and systems engineering managers. This dissertation research investigates the problem of an objective LOE approach, or quantitative model, for the...
Prior to Milestone A, the Department of Defense (DoD) requires that service sponsors conduct an Analysis of Alternatives (AoA), an analytical comparison of multiple alternatives, to be completed prior to committing and investing costly resources to one project or decision. Despite this...
Today's National Airspace System (NAS) is managed using an aging surveillance radar system. Current radar technology is not adequate to sustain the rapid growth of the commercial, civil, and federal aviation sectors and cannot be adapted to use emerging 21st century airspace surveillance...
Flight safety has been an important topic for both academia and the industry. Aviation experts and authorities, as well as commercial airline administrators, have always been looking for improvements in the safety of flights. Researchers, on the other hand, have tried to model avionic fatalities...
Ever since the release of the Brundtland Report by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED, 1987), the sustainable development (SD) concept has been gaining more and more traction from a majority of research disciplines in the recent two decades. For instance, the impact of...
Problem management is not recognized as a system engineering process. Unlike risk management where risks could impact a project at some future date, problems impact the project now. Therefore, a robust problem management process should be established (similar to the risk management process...
An essential component of post disaster planning and preparation is the identification and selection of temporary disaster debris management sites (DMS). However, because DMS identification is a complex process, many regional, county and municipal jurisdictions initiate this process during the...
The decision process for technology projects often includes a financial return on investment (ROI) analysis. This is a well-known and established process that has been widely used in the private sector. A modified version is the cost benefit analysis, which is used in the public sector. Both of...
Current day Network Intrusion Detection Systems have several shortcomings such as high rates of false positive alerts, low detection rates of rare but dangerous attacks and the need for constant human intervention and tuning. Daily reports of incidents appear in public media including major...
The past decade has seen the rapid development and deployment of unmanned systems throughout the world in both civilian and military applications. Significant development has been led by the Department of Defense (DoD), which has sought to develop and field military systems, such as unmanned...
This research investigates the instantiation of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) within a hard real-time (stringent time constraints), deterministic (maximum predictability) combat system (CS) environment. There are numerous stakeholders across the U.S. Department of the Navy who are...
Public and private organizations face the challenges of protecting their networks from cyber-attacks, while reducing the amount of time and money spent on Information Technology. Organizations can reduce their expenditures by reusing server, switch and router hardware, but they must use reliable...
System engineers use qualitative and quantitative measurements in their work. The use of quantitative measurements is growing but the mathematical rigor behind these measurements is not always done and presented in the literature. Without the mathematical rigor misleading results can occur....
This research investigates the presence of cognitive biases in the risk management processes utilized at NASA, Department of Defense, and within the broader aerospace sector. A widely applied risk management tool in the aerospace sector is the risk matrix. Risk matrices were used in practice...
This dissertation represents a modeling and simulation approach toward determining whether distributed computing architectures (e.g., Cloud Computing) require state of the art servers to ensure top performance, and whether alternate approaches can result in optimized Quality of Service by...
Determining the optimum allocation of resources in a portfolio of tests for a Department of Defense (DoD) system is a challenging problem, primarily due to the lack of an accepted and easily obtained value measure for test results. Past attempts to quantify the value that a test provides to a...
The complex civil-military situation and adaptive irregular threat in Iraq and Afghanistan are indicative of future warfare challenges for the United States. Using technology to adapt rapidly United States Army ground combat vehicles for these challenges creates unique supportability issues....
Agencies need to collaborate with each other to perform missions, improve mission performance, and find efficiencies. The ability of individual government agencies to collaborate with each other for mission and business success and efficiency is complicated by the different techniques used to...
Modern society is increasingly dependent on the smooth operation of large scale technology supporting Earth based activities such as communication, electricity distribution, and navigation. This technology is potentially threatened by global geomagnetic storms, which are caused by the impact of...
The United States (U.S.) Federal Government has long had a need for highly secure communications. The National Security Agency (NSA) is responsible for the wide range of technologies to secure these communications. They realized, recently, that the development times for U.S. Government encryption...
Every year, the Department of Defense (DoD) invests billions of dollars on the development of major defense acquisition programs. In return, many of these weapon systems have been plagued with cost overruns and schedule delays during the Engineering and Manufacturing Development phase. Under...
Business process optimization allows businesses to remain competitive by allowing management to observe, analyze, and improve the operations of the organization. Using data and related business insights developed through applied analytic disciplines to drive business process optimization allows...
Each year, the Department of Defense (DoD) is provided with an appropriation and authorization act from Congress known as the Military Construction (MILCON) program. The DoD delegates this financial authority to subordinate units for the purpose of funding the design and execution of new...
The Department of Defense and the aerospace industry are responsible for decades of successful implementation of systems engineering process models used for the development of complex systems. The process models implemented throughout acquisition life cycles have proven to be comprehensive and...
Functionality and performance have been key elements of requirements generation for major systems, especially within the Department of Defense (DoD). However, rising cost growth rates and decreasing funding has led to legislation requiring DoD to factor cost into requirements selection and to...
A Tool Chain Approach to Source Lines Of Code Estimation Using Petri Nets and Directed Graphs presents the development and demonstration of a novel tool-chain using known techniques with the intent of supporting more accurate source line of code (SLOC) predictions to improve software level of...
Quality assurance during the operation of a system is critical for maintaining performance within desired specifications. Without proper monitoring and control, a system is capable of erratic behavior resulting in degraded performance, unplanned downtime for maintenance, or system failure....
There are significant challenges involved in regulating the growing commercial human spaceflight industry. The safety of the crew and passengers should be protected; however, care should be taken not to overburden the industry with too many or too stringent, or perhaps inapplicable,...
Risk on a project or program is typically evaluated in terms of the triple constraint: scope, time, and cost. The Monte Carlo method (Metropolis & Ulam, 1949) is a widely accepted risk analysis technique and is deemed to be an effective way of analyzing the uncertainty associated with cost and...
Cloud computing offers the advantage of on-demand, reliable and cost efficient computing solutions without the capital investment and management resources to build and maintain in-house data centers and network infrastructures. Scalability of cloud solutions enable consumers to upgrade or...
Over the last several decades the technology revolution has compounded system complexity with the integration of multi-spectral sensors and interactive command and control systems. These complexities create additional challenges for requirement developers to produce an encompassing set of...
Systems engineering teams' value-creation for enterprises is slower than possible due to inefficiencies in communication, learning, common knowledge collaboration and leadership conduct. This dissertation outlines the surrounding people, process and technology dimensions for higher performing...
Over the past few decades, the public sector has seen significant change in the political and economic environment due to greater interdependencies between agencies and the private sector, globalization, and rapid technological change. The resulting uncertainty introduces a number of challenges...
Software intensive space systems can harbor defects and vulnerabilities that may enable external adversaries or malicious insiders to disrupt or disable system functions, risking mission compromise or loss. Mitigating this risk demands a sustained focus on the security and resiliency of the...
Convective weather and other constraints create uncertainty in air transportation, leading to costly delays. A Ground Delay Program (GDP) is a strategy to mitigate these effects. Systematic decision support can increase GDP efficacy, reduce delays, and minimize direct operating costs. In this...
This study employed the taxonomy of human factors presented in the Department of Defense Human Factors and Analysis and Classification System (based largely on the previous HFACS model developed by Wiegmann and Shappell, and Reason's "Swiss cheese" model) model to analyze and compare the human...
Market dynamics, technology spin-cycles, and affordability pressures are shaping development demands for medical devices.Model-based development offers a remedy for these pressures, with demonstrated ability to mitigate the complexity introduced. This dissertation will examine the program...
Developing nations are poised to spend billions on information and communication technology (ICT) innovation in 2020. A study of the historical adoption of ICT in developing nations has indicated that their adoption patterns do not follow typical technology innovation adoption models. This study...
Integration Readiness Level (IRL) can be an effective systems engineering tool to facilitate integration of System of Systems (SoS). Further research in systems integration, analysis of major SoS integration data, and analysis of expert survey inputs to SoS integration can enhance the current IRL...