Strategic system design and development using collaborative tools

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the fields of technology and business in order to enhance and optimize system design solutions. The intent of this thesis is to apply the theoretical concepts identified in core System Design and Management (SDM) classes in a professional business environment, with consideration given to strategic design and development aspects for an enterprise-wide system. Over the past decade, business enterprises have been forced to downsize, outsource, and/or merge in order to stay competitive. This holds true for the United States Navy as well. As a result of the end of the Cold War and the fall of Communism, new requirements have resulted in a substantial decrease in defense funding and have forced the Navy to reduce its number of personnel. This, in turn, has led to a number of programs and products being outsourced. The combination of new requirements. outsourcing, and the increased complexities of new and existing technologies have resulted in a lack of system understanding, thus creating interoperability issues. Given this scenario, the requirement for a holistic understanding of system and subsystem interactions in a dynamic environment has become paramount. The objective is to enable an enterprise to be adaptive, so that when changes are required, the ability exists to have an architecture that allows rapid understanding of the system and its surroundings. This thesis examines engineering and management tools that assist an organization in understanding a system and in the rapid development of strategic designs that exhibit the desired integrated system-level characteristics. Specifically, three product and process tools will be examined: the Distributive Object-based Modeling Environment (DOME) application, the Design Structure Matrix (DSM), and Set-Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE) principles. It is believed that the application of DOME can significantly reduce costs for product and process design by allowing engineers to access existing models/tools in a distributive fashion to improve system design quality. Likewise, methodologies such as DSM and SBCE provide an improved process to effectively perform system level engineering. This thesis considers two Navy programs that the author has participated in while in the SDM program. These programs, the Torpedo Silencing Initiative and the Warfighting Concepts to Future Weapon System Designs (WARCON) project, are used as case studies to show that DOME, DSM, and SBCE principles can provide a distributed, integrated framework for enterprise-wide predictive design simulation.