Application of a DoDAF Total-Ship System Architecture in Building a Design Reference Mission for Assessing Naval Ship Operational Effectiveness

The Naval Ship Design Concept and Requirements Exploration (C&RE) process used at Virginia Tech is based on a Multi-Objective Optimization approach that explores the design space to identify a Non-Dominated set of ship design solutions ranked by cost, risk, and effectiveness. The current method of calculating an Overall Measure of Effectiveness (OMOE) used in this approach is based on expert opinion and pairwise comparison. Despite the good results obtained using expert opinion, more direct physics-based Operational Effectiveness Models (OEMs) starting with a detailed Design Reference Mission (DRM) including mission Operational Situations (OpSits), conditions, and measures may provide greater confidence in the validity of the results and a perception that results are more unbiased and rational. This paper describes a method for building a Design Reference Mission (DRM) composed of multiple Operational Situations (OpSits) required by the ship’s mission. The DRM is defined using a Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) approach and a Total-Ship System Architecture to define and understand the relationships between various aspects of the ship design and their relationship to operational effectiveness. The system architecture is based on the DoD Architecture Framework (DoDAF 2.0). It includes the DRM and enables the development of Operational Effectiveness Models (OEMs) as an alternative to an expert opinion-based OMOE. A notional US Coast Guard (USCG) Offshore Patrol Vessel (OPV) is used as an example in this paper. The ship design architecture and Design Reference Mission are based on the OPV mission requirement specified in a notional Initial Capabilities Document (ICD). 1. MOTIVATION AND BACKGROUND The traditional approach to ship design is largely an ‘ad hoc’ process. Experience, design lanes, rules of thumb, preference, and imagination guide selection of design concepts for assessment. Often, objective attributes are not adequately quantified or presented to support efficient and effective decisions. This is particularly true for mission effectiveness. Requirements and design characteristics cannot be rationally specified without a thorough understanding of their impact on total ship cost, risk and effectiveness [3][8][19][20]. Over the last fifteen years at Virginia Tech and MIT, a total system approach to the ship design process has been developed, including an efficient search of the design space for non-dominated designs based on the multi-objective considerations of effectiveness, cost and risk [2][3][4][16][17][23][25]. This approach addresses the Analysis of Alternatives phases (Pre-AOA and AOA) of the US Department of Defense acquisition process. The current method of calculating an Overall Measure of Effectiveness ASNE Global Deterrence and Defense Symposium 2011, Bloomington, IN, September 13-14, 2011.