Introduction to the Mission Thread Workshop

Abstract

In Department of Defense programs, a system of systems (SoS) is integrated to accomplish a number of missions that involve cooperation among individual systems. Understanding the activities conducted within each system and how they interoperate to accomplish the missions of the SoS is of vital importance. A mission thread is a sequence of end-to-end activities and events, given as a series of steps, that accomplish the execution of one or more capabilities that the SoS supports. However, listing the steps and describing them do not reveal all the important concerns associated with cooperation among the systems to accomplish the mission; understanding the architectural and engineering considerations associated with each mission thread is also essential. The Mission Thread Workshop (MTW) is a facilitated, stakeholder-centric workshop whose purpose is to elicit and refine end-to-end quality attribute, capability, and engineering considerations for SoS mission threads. This report introduces the MTW, describes the three phases of an MTW, and explains the steps of each phase in detail. It also describes the benefits that a program can expect from conducting an MTW, which include identifying quality attributes and architectural challenges but also reach beyond these goals to expose gaps in capability, functionality, documentation, and engineering.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 01, 2013
Accession Number
ADA610474

Entities

People

  • Bill Wood
  • Mike Gagliardi
  • Tim Morrow

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy
  • Engineered Resilient Systems
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • Air Defense
  • Aircrafts
  • Application Software
  • Ballistic Missiles
  • Command And Control
  • Command And Control Systems
  • Department Of Defense
  • Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Software Design
  • Software Development
  • System Of Systems
  • Systems Engineering
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Training
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Aerospace logistics and air mobility.
  • Enterprise Information Systems Architecture and Joint Command Capability Interoperability Support.
  • Software Engineering.