With unprecedented budget cuts resulting from Sequestration and a United States economy that has not yet rebounded, `do more with less' is the new motto for both industry and government. However, that is easier said than done. With 70% of a product's life cycle cost set at the concept...
Costs of aerospace missions have increased over the last twenty years, placing the future of the space program in jeopardy. A potential source for such growth can be attributed to the complex multidisciplinary and challenging nature of earth and space science instrument development. Design...
A systems engineer must identify effective techniques for improving the convergence of a System of Systems (SoS). The effectiveness of the identified techniques needs to be quantified so that the stakeholders may make informed cost benefit decisions. Exploring outer worlds, defending from...
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...
Given the push to provide defensible test data in the Department of Defense (DoD) Test and Evaluation (T&E;) Enterprise, the use of statistical methods has taken center stage. This research investigates the applicability of statistical tolerance intervals in designed experiments as an analysis...
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...
Early systems engineering has been emphasized as a critical success factor within the U.S. defense acquisition community. With the trend of system complexity, technology dependencies, and interoperability requirements, defense acquisitions frequently suffer schedule slips and cost overruns. After...
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...
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...
Through inward perceptions, we intuitively expect distributed software development to increase the risks of achieving quality goals compared to co-located software development. To compound this problem, Agile Software Development (ASD) maintains that face-to-face (synchronous) communication...
Different classes of problems warrant different classes of solutions. There is no agreed set of unified principles and models to support systems engineering use over a wide range of domains. Nor is there a set of consistent terminology and definitions. These two deficiencies impede the adoption...
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been plagued by poorly managed disasters throughout its history. As the Agency has evolved, it has adopted the use of better technology to enhance its missions. Hurricane Sandy represented a shift in technology adoption and community engagement...
This dissertation assesses the current state of systems data management, particularly of point cloud data from light detection and ranging (LIDAR) reports, and proposes a full multi-dimensional data management system using custom software. The volume of collected point cloud data is growing...
This research was conducted to evaluate and quantify the impacts complexity has on schedule based on errors created by organizational and system dependencies that occur during software integration testing. The combination of individually developed and managed systems and their interdependencies...
Usability issues present in current Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems diminish healthcare provider satisfaction, lower productivity, and introduce medication-related errors, all major factors that impact improvements in the quality-of-care and lead to unrealized savings estimated at $12...
Building complex physics-based systems in a timely cost-effective manner, that perform well, meet diverse user needs, and have no bad emergent behaviors is a challenge. To meet these requirements the solution is to model the physics-based system before building it. Modeling and Simulation...
Due to increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration and its effect on global climates, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposes a Clean Power Plan (CPP) mandating CO2 reductions which will likely force the early retirement of inefficient, aging power plants. Consequentially,...
The difficulty of detecting insider threats before catastrophic events can occur continues to plague many industries, and the aviation industry is under particular pressure to detect possible infiltration by terrorists and their sympathizers posing as legitimate workers. Insider threats were...
Risk identification during the design and development phases of complex systems is commonly implemented but often fails to result in the identification of events and circumstances that truly challenge project performance. Inefficiencies in cost and schedule estimation are usually held accountable...
Department of Defense (DOD) weapon acquisition programs often suffer from schedule slips and cost overruns associated with unanticipated performance failures found in the latter part of the programs. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) claims that cost and schedule estimates based on...
Quality by Design (QbD) has been recognized as a superior manufacturing approach versus attempting to test in quality. Without designing for quality, the level of quality attainment (defect-free product) has been observed to plateau well short of six sigma, and efforts to further improve quality...
As a result of the reuse of legacy systems by the Department of Defense (DoD), DoD programs often experience overruns and technical difficulties. With the constriction of DoD budgets, reuse of legacy systems is frequently touted as the solution to cost, efficiency, and time to delivery problems;...
The cost of Department of Defense (DoD) weapon systems acquisitions has risen at an alarming rate of 46% since the 1960s, according to third-party investigations. Despite considerable DoD efforts to reduce cost growth, historical review demonstrates a pattern of underestimation of weapon systems...
A System Dynamics Approach to Implementing Consumer Experience in Technology Adoption ModelsThe ethanol-fuel ecosystem presents a common narrative seen in many systems whose components include durable goods with high switching costs to the consumer: Market growth does not match policy...
Immature systems can be plagued by high costs, high risks, and schedule delays. System maturity models are utilized to quantitatively analyze a system’s readiness to indicate whether the system is prepared to proceed to the next acquisition phase during development. Most system maturity models...
Human error remains the highest symptomatic cause of system failure across multiple domains. Technology failure has seen a significant rate decrease through analyses and design changes, but human error causal factors have not experienced the same level of improvement. Designers and developers...
The requirement engineering phase is widely considered an essential part of the system engineering process. As system complexity increases, system engineers will require tools dealing with the challenges complexity introduces. The ability to recognize, capture, and analyze these system...
The Department of the Defense (DOD) has transitioned smart devices onto the battlefield as a portable, handheld unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) ground control station (GCS) without adequate cybersecurity protections, which places critical missions and their data at risk. Industry has developed...