System Autonomy Modeling During Early Concept Definition

The current rapid systems engineering design methods, such as AGILE, significantly reduce the development time. This results in the early availability of incremental capabilities, increases the importance of accelerating and effectively performing early concept trade studies. Current system autonomy assessment tools are level based and are used to provide the levels of autonomy attained during field trials. These tools have limited applicability in earlier design definition stages. An algorithmic system autonomy tool is needed to facilitate trade off studies, analyses of alternatives and concept of operations performed during those very early phases. We developed our contribution to such a tool and described it in this paper. Keywords—Systems Engineering; Autonomous Systems; Requirements Engineering; System of Systems component; System Autonomy Modeling