Architecture Frameworks;MBSE;COTS;return on experience
Abstract
System design in defense systems is a competitive field, in which economical viability relies on a sequence of architectural decisions, aiming at quality, resource and time (Q,R,T) compromises. Furthermore, the investment to conduct weapon acquisitions and lifecycle maintenance until dismantlement involves major investments in industries. If systems engineering (SE) practice mostly focuses on early design activities and development, we observe that there is little information in literature in SE field that relate to general quality, resource and time compromises or quantified return-on-investment. On the other hand, we observe that low-cost unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) and drones appear as new threats on current battlefield. To face these new threats, ministries of defense have organized challenges around robotization of battlefield, to design future employment doctrines and help technologies to reach maturity in a reasonable time. This article exposes a set of NATO Architecture Framework (NAF) 3.1 views that match a recent robotic military challenge over two yearly iterations. The capabilities depicted are requirements to compete in the challenge, constituent systems are based on Components-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) answering to both edition of the challenge. For the second iteration, we re-used views that were selected at first, and realized documented return on experience (RetEx) reports for both editions. This article details how manually re-injecting feedback from field back to the system model failed to help for the second iteration of the challenge. Our works propose conclusions on capabilities iterations from a general perspective, and develop propositions that introduces the necessity to create realistic simulation environments threads to verify and validate emergent behavior of systems composed of COTS in a constrained time and resource context.