Concept of operations

About: Concept of operations is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 964 publications have been published within this topic receiving 6845 citations. The topic is also known as: CONOPS.

Fully integrated multi-vehicles mine countermeasure missions

Abstract: The capability and cost effectiveness that autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) bring to mine countermeasure operations (MCM) has been widely demonstrated and accepted in recent years. However, these operations still rely mainly on surface vessels, human operators and divers. These current Navy forces are showing their limitations for modern MCM doctrine: they are vulnerable, costly and slow to deploy. In this paper, we analyse the benefits and requirements of heterogeneous fleets of AUVs for enabling fully integrated MCM operations. The Ocean Systems Laboratory has a record of successful concept demonstrations at all the Detection, Classification, Identification, and Neutralisation (DCIN) stages of the MCM workflow. Nevertheless, a demonstration showing all the multidisciplinary capabilities fully integrated in a truly autonomous distributed sensing-decision-act loop has never been achieved. In this paper, we describe the research and engineering challenges that we are facing. Then, we introduce the existing research contributions in automatic target recognition, knowledge distribution and decision making processes. This will allow us to overcome the research challenges and to demonstrate its capability. We also propose a set of combined metrics to evaluate the performance improvement of the system over state-of-the-art approaches. We identify a possible concept of operation scenario for a demonstration. Finally we present the results of the fully integrated MCM mission conducted at the end of last year.

Wind dependent concepts for wake avoidance: a comparative analysis of capacity benefits and implementation risks

Abstract: The FAA and NASA are jointly embarking on a multiphased research and development program to develop and implement wake vortex avoidance solutions that can safely reduce separations and improve capacity at airports in the NAS. Many options have been proposed by the wake turbulence community and it is necessary to focus research efforts on the most promising solutions. As part of its WakeVAS initiative, NASA has conducted an investigation of the research difficulty and cost for candidate operational enhancements through a Conops evaluation team (CET). This team included participation by stakeholders from many research, system engineering, system development, pilot, and controller organizations. The operational enhancements that were evaluated included wind-dependent concepts for arrivals to closely spaced parallel runways (CSPRs), departures from CSPRs operated as a single runway, arrivals to single runways, and departures from single runways. To complement this work and help provide the information necessary for NASA to focus their research program toward the most promising concepts, MITRE/CAASD performed an analysis of the potential capacity benefit, opportunity for application, and implementation risk for each arrival and departure concept evaluated by the CET. This paper provides an overview of the direction in which NASA research will proceed and the analysis results that help support this decision.

An analysis of the kill chain for time critical strike

Abstract: : The detection and destruction of Time-Critical Targets (TCTs) has been a challenge for our military. NAVAIR has investigated a future time-critical strike (TCS) architecture and concept of operations (CONOPS) in order to explore the effectiveness of high-speed weapons against TCTs. NAVAIR has implemented an architecture and CONOPS in a simulation model. This thesis extends NAVAIR's work by developing flexible models and exploring the effects that alternative CONOPS may have on high-speed weapon requirements and system performance against TCTs. The TCTs are a single wave of theater ballistic missile (TBM) transporter-erector-launchers (TELs) that appear over a short time interval and can saturate the command and control architectures considered. For the architecture and alternative CONOPS explored, it is difficult to improve upon the performance of the baseline TCS system developed of NAVAIR.

Concept of Operations for Urban Air Mobility Command and Control Communications

Abstract: Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is a burgeoning flight services concept for passenger and cargo airborne applications operating within and around urban environments. Among the services envisioned, most attention is being directed at airborne personal transport to improve transit time and mitigate automobile congestion. In addition, delivery services for more efficient transport of goods and local area information gathering for timely media dissemination and emergency monitoring will also likely be early UAM system applications. Among the infrastructure components in need of development are communications systems that manage these air vehicles. Not only will there be a need to communicate with the pilots in command of the aircraft for traffic management, but the control of the aircraft and monitoring of the aircraft systems will also need to use these communications systems to ensure safe operations.

Identifying Application Key Knowledge through System Operations Modeling

Abstract: One of the problems associated with complex systems engineering is identifying the system knowledge relevant to build system implementation. System operations are an essential part of this knowledge. Software and system engineering standards highlight the importance of system operations; templates for a concept of operations document are available from different standard bodies in the context of requirements engineering and specification. However, specific guidelines for operations modeling are not usually provided. This paper introduces an approach to systematically model system operations. The cornerstone for this is an operations metamodel; this metamodel is presented within this paper and has been defined using UML 2.x. The baseline for the metamodel is a schema, also introduced within the paper, which formalizes system operations in terms of commands acting on systems, inputs to the system, and different kinds of outputs classified into responses, notifications and alarms. Operations models, as presented here, comprise system knowledge essentials from a functional point of view but reduced in size compared to the whole system specification. They can be deployed in several ways; this paper presents their use as drivers for system development and validation from early lifecycle stages.