Azad M. Madni

Towards a Conceptual Framework for Resilience Engineering

As systems continue to grow in size and complexity, they pose increasingly greater safety and risk management challenges. Today when complex systems fail and mishaps occur, there is an initial tendency to attribute the failure to human error. Yet research has repeatedly shown that more often than not it is not human error but organizational factors that set up adverse conditions that increase the likelihood of system failure. Resilience engineering is concerned with building systems that are able to circumvent accidents through anticipation, survive disruptions through recovery, and grow through adaptation. This paper defines resilience from different perspectives, provides a conceptual framework for understanding and analyzing disruptions, and presents principles and heuristics based on lessons learned that can be employed to build resilient systems.

Towards affordably adaptable and effective systems

Resilience means different things in different disciplines. From a systems engineering perspective, we define resilience as the ability of a system to adapt affordably and perform effectively across a wide range of operational contexts, where context is defined by mission, environment, threat, and force disposition. A key issue in engineering resilient systems is the lengthy and costly upfront engineering process, which program managers justifiably find unacceptable. This paper presents how advances in computational technology can potentially transform the system development process in new and novel ways to enable fast, efficient, and inexpensive upfront engineering—the key to engineering resilient systems. These processes, in turn, can enable rapid development, deployment, and operation of affordably adaptable and effective systems. ©2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 16

Adaptable platform-based engineering: Key enablers and outlook for the future

Platform-Based Engineering (PBE) is a cost-effective, risk-mitigated system development approach that employs a common structure from which high-quality derivative products can be developed rapidly. PBE is especially effective in decreasing development cost, risks, and lead times while increasing product quality. Appropriately scoped, platforms simplify and accelerate the development of families of systems for a particular problem domain. They encompass domain-specific components and services that reflect the commonalities of systems in the domain (which can be configured as reusable physical or informational components), and variabilities across the domain (which need to be individually developed to achieve a domain product line), along with interface conventions that ensure that they can plug-and-play with the domain infrastructure and common components. However, PBE has a potential downside. Locking into a platform strategy for the long term can severely limit an organizations ability to evolve a product. It is this recognition that spurred the development of the adaptable PBE paradigm. Adaptable PBE offers the customary benefits of PBE without compromising the long-term evolvability of the system. This paper presents the game changing technologies under the adaptable PBE rubric, and discusses the key concepts and advances needed to make adaptable PBE an enabler of evolvable systems.

Elegant systems design: Creative fusion of simplicity and power

Elegance is a term frequently associated with aesthetics in design. It typically connotes simplicity, beauty, and grace. When it comes to complex systems, it also connotes predictable behavior, power, and creative functionality. Elegance is what separates the merely functional from the engaging. An elegant design usually has a thematic vision that drives its creation. It engages both designers and users and supports creative exploration on their part. The process of elegant design is an iterative, creative process that exploits systems thinking, probing questioning, and appropriate analogies and metaphors to gain insights that can be transformed novel solutions. This paper provides key insights into elegant systems design and characteristics of elegant systems designers. It offers a heuristics-driven elegant systems design process along with metrics for assessing elegance.

IDEONTM: An extensible ontology for designing, integrating, and managing collaborative distributed enterprises

An organizations ability to achieve and sustain competitive advantage in the face of continual change depends, to a large extent, on the adaptability, interoperability, and maintainability of its enterprise management approach and supporting software implementation. In this regard, the major challenges facing organizations are: (a) achieving seamless integration of enterprise design, management and control processes and supporting applications; (b) ensuring interoperability between new and legacy business applications; and (c) adapting business strategies and ongoing operations to changes in the external and internal environments. The latter requires integrated planning and execution of enterprise processes. This paper presents IDEONTM, a unified, extensible enterprise ontology that has been designed in response to these needs. Two specific applications of IDEONTM are presented along with the specific extensions for each application.

Systems Integration: Key Perspectives, Experiences, and Challenges

As systems continue to grow in scale and complexity, systems integration SI has become a key concern. This is especially the case in defense and aerospace. SI involves interfacing and enabling the interactions of component elements to collectively provide the functionality needed by the system to accomplish its goals. SI is part of the overall system development life cycle. SI increases in complexity when there are legacy systems that need to be integrated, and when humans are an integral part of the system. An added layer of complexity is introduced when the system has to exhibit resilience and adaptability in the face of contingencies in the operational environment. This paper addresses key perspectives and challenges in SI. Specifically, it presents the integration continuum, ranging from loose to tight integration. It presents a SI ontology that captures the key issues and concerns in a standard language. It also presents various categories of integration and their unique challenges. This paper is intended to clarify various types of integration and to stimulate new ways of thinking about SI.

Engineered Resilient Systems: A DoD Perspective

Department of Defense (DoD) systems are required to be trusted and effective in a wide range of operational contexts with the ability to respond to new or changing conditions through modified tactics, appropriate reconfiguration, or replacement. As importantly, these systems are required to exhibit predictable and graceful degradation outside their designed performance envelope. For these systems to be included in the force structure, they need to be manufacturable, readily deployable, sustainable, easily modifiable, and cost-effective. Collectively, these requirements inform the definition of resilient DoD systems. This paper explores the properties and tradeoffs for engineered resilient systems in the military context. It reviews various perspectives on resilience, overlays DoD requirements on these perspectives, and presents DoD challenges in realizing and rapidly fielding resilient systems. This paper also presents promising research themes that need to be pursued by the research community to help the DoD realize the vision of affordable, adaptable, and effective systems. This paper concludes with a discussion of specific DoD systems that can potentially benefit from resilience and stresses the need for sustaining a community of interest in this important area.

System of Systems Integration: Key Considerations and Challenges

As systems are called on to participate on demand within system-of-systems SoS, system-of-systems integration SoSI has become a key concern. This capability is especially important in defense and aerospace where systems are increasingly required to interoperate on demand to satisfy mission requirements. SoSI is also becoming increasingly important in healthcare and energy domains. SoSI involves interfacing and enabling the interactions of component systems to create the needed SoS capability to accomplish mission or business goals. SoSI, which is part of the overall SoS development life cycle, increases in complexity when there are legacy systems that need to be integrated, and when humans are tasked to perform in various capacities within the SoS. An added layer of complexity is introduced when the SoS has to exhibit certain quality attributes such as adaptability and resilience in the face of contingencies and disruptions in the operational environment. This paper addresses key considerations and challenges in SoSI.

Leveraging Biometrics for User Authentication in Online Learning: A Systems Perspective

With the rapid proliferation of online learning, students are increasingly demanding easy and flexible access to learning content at a time and location of their choosing. In these environments, remote users connecting via the public Internet or other unsecure networks must be authenticated prior to being granted access to sensitive content such as tests or personal/private records. Today, the overwhelming majority of online learning systems rely on weak authentication mechanisms to verify the identity of remote users only at the start of each session. One-time authentication using password, personal identification number (PIN), or even hardware tokens is clearly inadequate in that it cannot defend against insider attacks including remote user impersonation or illegal sharing or disclosure of these authentication secrets. As such, these methods are entirely unsuitable for circumstances where the outcome of an online assessment or a course of study is the granting of a formal degree, professional certification, or qualification or requalification for a particular skill or function. This paper examines the problem of remote authentication in online learning environments and explores the challenges and options of using biometric technology to defend against user impersonation attacks by certifying the presence of the user in front of the computer, at all times. It also leverages a 5-step process as the basis for a systems approach to ensuring that the proposed solution will meet the critical remote authentication assurance requirements. The process and systems approach employed here are generic, and can be exploited when introducing biometric-enabled authentication solutions to other applications and business domains. The paper concludes by presenting a biometrics-based client-server architecture for continuous user authentication in e-learning environments.

Expanding Stakeholder Participation in Upfront System Engineering through Storytelling in Virtual Worlds

Over the last decade, systems engineers have successfully created system modeling languages to communicate with other systems engineers. However, the ability to communicate an evolving system concept and design with stakeholders who are nonengineers remains an elusive goal. In large part, this inability stems from the latter having to understand complex diagrams and equations, and learn new notations employed by systems modeling languages. The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that systems today have to frequently adapt to changing operational and regulatory requirements. Thus, to effectively communicate concepts of operation CONOPS and evolving system design to those outside the engineering discipline requires a different approach. This paper presents an innovative approach that employs technical storytelling methods to contextualize and map systems engineering SE artifacts represented in SysML to virtual worlds within which various storylines can play out. This capability is intended to improve comprehensibility and transparency of CONOPS and system designs when it comes to communicating with the broader stakeholder community. At the heart of this approach is a virtual world enabled by a 3D game engine, and a mapping capability that allows translation of SE artifacts and interdependencies to virtual world entities and interactions. The key idea behind this integrated capability is to allow the broader stakeholder community to collaborate effectively on key decisions during upfront SE. The benefits of this approach are greater stakeholder satisfaction, avoidance of rework, and more responsive system design.