Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap FY2011-2036 - Defense ...

Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap FY2011-2036
advancing T&E that will address cost saving through early-on engagement and effective
sustainment in facilitating unmanned systems acquisition.
The two previous vignettes have focused on the utility of unmanned systems, but it is also
helpful to focus on unmanned systems acquisition. The acquisition of systems with increasing
net-centricity and automated functionality will introduce unexpected levels of risk. Systems
engineering involves decomposing a design into separable elements, characterizing the intended
relationships between them, and verifying the system built to specification operates as intended.
The systems engineering “V” represents decomposition and design on the downstroke and
integration, verification, and validation on the upstroke. As systems become more complex, the
difficulties of addressing the upstroke of the “V” increase. T&E is critical for addressing this
risk. The systems engineering of complex systems is gets scrutinized when major problems lead
to program delays, cost overruns, and even cancellations. The issues typically lie with
unintended and unanticipated interactions between elements that are uncovered only during
integration, testing, or once in service. The T&E of manned systems has created optimal
strategies for reducing risk in the areas of frequency, performance, support systems, and safety.
The primary challenge for today’s defense acquisition system is to execute acquisition programs
without major schedule delays and cost overruns. Meeting that challenge has been the goal of
acquisition reform improvements for decades.
Unmanned systems raise new issues of artificial intelligence, communications, autonomy,
interoperability, propulsion and power, and manned-unmanned (MUM) teaming that will
challenge current T&E capabilities. These problems will get more serious as systems become
more interactive and more automated. Failures often occur at the interfaces between system
elements, in many cases, between interfaces thought to be separate. The exponential trends in
software and network communications increasingly mean that many elements of a system can
now affect one another. The incredible complexity of millions of lines of software requires new
approaches for detecting problems earlier in the design phase where cost mitigation is most
effective. As systems get much of their functionality from software and multisystem interactions,
complexity is no longer separate and distinct. Complexity is about the whole ecosystem, and
systems engineering has to become more holistic. Model-based systems engineering, already in
use by the software and circuit industries, is augmenting document-driven approaches in
important ways. Executable models can be effective conveyors of information throughout a
supply chain. Models designed to provide contextual information about the degrees of freedom
and the interactions could potentially pass from the Government to the prime supplier and on to
second- and third-tier suppliers from early concept through Milestones A, B, and C into the
operations and support phase.
Location: DoD T&E Centers Across the World
Situation: In a rapid acquisition support environment, integrated T&E teams work with
trainers and the user to accelerate the production of unmanned systems. The model involves
industries that must leverage test frameworks to take advantage of Moore’s Law advances that
are exploitable every 18 months. The same technologies are actually subcomponents in the
payload, communication, command system, and remote sensor support systems that currently
compose various unmanned system of systems configurations.
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