Engineering Cyber Physical Systems: Machine Learning, Data Analytics and Smart Systems Architecting, San Jose, CA (November 2014)

New automated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) sensors and processing technologies provide access to larger amounts of high quality intelligence data. Managing this technology represents a profound system of systems challenge. In this study, we use system dynamics simulation to analyze and assess a processing, exploitation, and dissemination (PED) system performance across a range of task areas. The resulting recommendations identify emerging research, technologies, and tools than can improve future PED systems.

The approach used by this study to develop PED technology recommendations involved three tasks. First, domain reviews based on recent and related PED research were combined with knowledge gleaned from subject matter experts to identify support areas and categorize emerging system challenges. Second, we searched for an appropriate methodology and chose to take a system dynamics (SD) analysis approach to explore these challenges. This SD approach was then extended based on Cognitive Systems Engineering (CSE) insights and applied in limited and controlled scenario to verify its efficacy. The outputs from this application produced were then used to identify initial findings for further analysis coupled with a CSE work domain analysis to provide a basis for the technology recommendations, based on outputs from the SD simulation.