Infusion of Cognitive Engineering into Systems Engineering Processes and Practices

Abstract

The infusion of engineering (CogE) methods and tools into traditional systems engineering processes and practices is becoming an important priority as the systems engineering community begins to tackle system of systems (SoS) problems. As one illustration, the military is interested in creating cognitively-inspired systems (as small as a PDA and as large as a weapon platform) that maximally exploit human potential while also accelerating both human supported and automated decision making. To date, engineering has been successfully applied to the planning and requirements definition phases of systems engineering (also known as front-end analysis) but has yet to be infused into the remaining phases of systems engineering. To span the full systems engineering lifecycle, it is important, first and foremost, to communicate the return-on-investment to the various stakeholders to get their buy in. The second question that needs to be answered is whether or not cognitive engineering is ready for primetime. This paper presents promising technical and management strategies to overcome the challenges in introducing engineering into system-of-systems engineering (SOSE). Specifically, it presents a representative set of engineering methods and tools to span the full SoS life-cycle as well as engineering awareness initiatives to penetrate both the DoD acquisition community and commercial industry.