Establishing Measures of Effectiveness for Command and Control: A Systems Engineering Perspective

Abstract

Formulating Measures of Effectiveness (MOE) for complex socio-technical systems is a difficult task. Systems such as these only become purposeful when they are integrated as part of a parent system. Without this parent system they are purposive and are unable to perform a mission. The MOEs of these component systems are tightly linked to the contribution they can make to the achievement of the parent system's mission. In military operations, the purposeful system is the result of the synergy generated by the component systems that constitute the force assigned to the commander to accomplish a mission. These components combine to provide the emergent properties necessary to satisfy the need and their individual effectiveness is assessed on the contribution they make to the parent system. An essential component of this purposeful system is Command and Control (C2) but it is difficult to separate the contribution that C2 makes to its parent system from those made by other component subsystems or to treat C2 as an isolated system. Because of this, the formulation of MOEs for C2, and for similar systems in other areas, a difficult task. It is possible that the behavioural or soft' sciences will offer a solution.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2001
Accession Number
ADA392037

Entities

People

  • Noel Sproles

Organizations

  • Defence Science and Technology Group

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Behavioral Sciences
  • Cognition
  • Command And Control
  • Command And Control Systems
  • Complex Systems
  • Department Of Defense
  • Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Measures Of Effectiveness
  • Military Operations
  • Military Organizations
  • Operations Research
  • Psychology
  • Systems Engineering
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Thinking
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Software Engineering
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • Fully Networked C3
  • Fully Networked C3 - Command and Control