4.4.1 Concept of Operations Development Considerations for a Highly Networked System

Abstract

Within the United States Department of Defense, the interest and focus on Network‐Centric Systems (NCS) is increasing. The US Navy defines network‐centric operations as “military operations that exploit state‐of‐the‐art information and networking technology to integrate widely dispersed human decision makers, situational and targeting sensors, and forces and weapons into a highly adaptive, comprehensive system to achieve unprecedented mission effectiveness.” (Committee, 2000) Therefore, the benefits of building a NCS appear to be obvious and desirable for providing greater information in order to render higher quality decisions and provide greater overall system capability. However what is not so obvious is the priority order of the incremental system benefits realized by the NCS. There is a need to identify the magnitude and order of the systems (or system capabilities) that are to be integrated to provide the greatest impact on the NCS mission needs. The importance of developing a clear Concept of Operations (ConOps) document has been acknowledged for many years (since R. J. Lano's seminal publication in 1980). The process traditionally involves a single Systems Engineer (or System Architect) responsible for taking the needs statements from the involved stakeholders, and consolidating this tops‐down information into a coherent ConOps document. When the size of systems and the number of stakeholders were both small this “single person focal point” was reasonable; however, with NCSs this approach is no longer sufficient. The challenge is how to best formulate a NCS‐level ConOps when the number of stakeholders with uncompromising needs has increased drastically. Since a new NCS is often made up of existing systems plus the development of new state‐of‐the‐art and emerging‐technology systems, there is potential to provide an early system analysis from the bottoms‐up and integrate with the stakeholder tops‐down needs. This source of information is the existing constituent system Concept of Operations (ConOps) documents. However, how can these be effectively used? This paper focuses on a reasonable implementation in direct support of the NCS Systems Engineer with the tops‐down and bottoms‐up mapping for effectively feeding the NCS‐level ConOps document development process.