Anyone who watches the television news has seen images of firefighters rescuing people from burning buildings and paramedics treating bombing victims. How do these individuals make the split-second decisions that save lives? Most studies of decision making, based on artificial tasks assigned in laboratory settings, view people as biased and unskilled. Gary Klein is one of the developers of the naturalistic decision-making approach, which views people as inherently skilled and experienced. Since 1985, Klein has conducted fieldwork to find out how people tackle challenges in difficult, nonroutine situations. Sources of Power is based on observations of humans acting under such real-life constraints as time pressure, high stakes, personal responsibility, and shifting conditions. In addition to providing information that can be used by professionals in management, psychology, engineering, and other fields, the book presents an overview of the research approach of naturalistic decision making and expands our knowledge of the strengths people bring to difficult tasks.

Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

The principles and methods of Model Driven Architecture are applied to the problem of requirements traceability for a System of Systems (SoS). Model transformations of operational threads are used to reduce the complexity of modeling mission requirements and their flow into the architecture of the SoS. The allocation of requirements to operational mission threads (OMTs) rather than to individual systems reduces the complexity of the requirements tracing. Relational transformations provide a mathematically based formalism for model transformations that permit precise computation of the transformation of operational threads into threads of systems allocated from the SoS. Connectivity requirements for the SoS are also exposed in this way and the number of permissible system threads are seen to correspond directly to the number of permissible transformations. The principles and methods are illustrated by an elementary case study for sensor fusion.

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/84032/CP_100622_Dickerson_Valerdi_IEEE_SoS.pdf?sequence=1

Using relational model transformations to reduce complexity in SoS requirements traceability: Preliminary investigation

An analysis of perspectives for “capability engineering” has been conducted by the INCOSE UK Capability Working Group (CWG). This paper is a continuation of this study led by the CWG ontology work stream that aims to develop a single shared ontology for the concept of capability engineering to enable semantic interoperability and to support a formal and explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation. Case study material from the different domains of rail, defence and information services was used. The ontology development was executed in three phases; (1) pre-analysis, (2) ontology modelling and (3) post-analysis. The pre-analysis involved literature reviews, requirements specification, systems engineering process utilisation; and resource identification i.e. examination of the case study material. The ontology modelling phase comprised information extraction and classification in addition to modelling and code representation using a mark-up tool, MS Excel and Protege. The post-analysis involved validation workshops through using expert focus groups.

/pdf/7-5-1-an-incremental-hybridisation-of-heterogeneous-case-53ofjv2f55.pdf

7.5.1 An incremental hybridisation of heterogeneous case studies to develop an ontology for capability engineering

This article was published in The Ergonomist, newsletter of the Institute of Ergonomics & Human Factors: http://www.ergonomics.org.uk/the-ergonomist

Evaluating the effects of culture on military operations

This thesis investigates the nature of systems problems and the need for an open viewpoint to explain a system by viewing it as part of a larger whole and explaining its role in terms of that larger whole. The problem this research investigates is wicked and hence is unique in each instance. Therefore, an empirical proof would only hold for that particular instantiation of the problem, not the problem as a whole. After exposing some of the limitations of traditional systems engineering to this type of problem it is clear that a new approach is needed. The approach taken in the thesis is model driven and it is the architecture of this approach that is the stable artefact rather than the artefacts of a particular solution. The approach developed in this research has been demonstrated to be practicable.

Specifically, this research has developed and demonstrated a novel approach for a decision support system that can be used to analyse a system of systems as part of a larger whole from both open and closed viewpoints in order to support the decision of which systems to use to conduct a particular military mission. Such planning decisions are wicked due to the uncertain and unique nature of military missions. Critical rationalism was used to validate the model driven approach and to falsify a parametric approach representative of traditional systems engineering through historical case studies. The main issue found with the parametric approach was the entanglement of functionality with the individual systems selected to implement the system of systems. The advantage of the model driven approach is that it separates functionality from implementation and uses model transformation for systems specification. 

Thus, although wicked problems do not have an exhaustively describable set of potential solutions this thesis has shown that they are not unapproachable.

Philip Johnson

Papers

Evaluating systems of systems against mission requirements