Dear Colleagues,

The term “mission engineering” refers to the mission as the system of interest and applies systems engineering concepts, methods, and tools to the design of missions.  Mission Engineering involves the determination of mission capabilities, a concept of operations, development and design of the operational activities, the operational network, and the allocation of operational activities to operational nodes for execution.  In many systems, the operational nodes are different systems, thus leading to a mission-oriented system-of-systems (SoS), which is formed to execute a single mission after which the SoS would disband.

In the military, the term mission defines the objective of a military operation.  However, the concept of mission engineering could be more broadly applied in other organizational contexts from logistics, healthcare, to energy since we design all systems with a purpose or objective.

There is a growing interest in how systems engineering can be applied at the mission level:  see for example Hernandez et al. (2017) and Irwin (2018).  Mission engineering must consider operational issues as well as technical issues.  Moreover, mission engineering is usually constrained by the available constituent systems, their capabilities, and the degree to which they can interoperate.  This changes the traditional top-down systems engineering process to a bottom-up process.

The special issue on mission engineering seeks papers addressing the following topics:

• Integration and interoperability
• MBSE with mission engineering
• Operational level trade studies
• Methods for mission engineering
• Tools for mission engineering
• Modeling and simulation
• Capability needs analysis
• Verification and validation
• System-of-systems engineering at the mission level
• Operational thread and scenario analysis

References

Hernandez, A.S.; Karimova, T.; Nelson, D.H. Mission engineering and analysis: innovations in the military decision making process. In Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Management 2017 International Annual Conference, Huntsville, AL, USA, 18-21 October 2017, doi: 10.13140/2.1.4139.3449.

Irwin, T. Operational mission architecture framework: A blended architecture methodology for enabling operational capability, Ph.D. Thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, USA, September 2018.

Prof. Dr. Ronald E. Giachetti
Guest Editor

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• mission engineering
• systems engineering
• capabilities
• model-based systems engineering
• system-of-systems
• operational analysis