Tech 101: Mission Engineering

The US Department of Defense (DoD) has expanded their emphasis on the application of systems engineering approaches to ‘missions’.  Mission Engineering (ME) is “an interdisciplinary approach and process encompassing the entire technical effort to analyze, design, and integrate current and emerging operational needs and capabilities to achieve desired mission outcomes”.  This presentation outlines the current mission engineering methodology, describes how it is currently being applied, and explores the role of T&E in the ME process.

Mission engineering is applying systems engineering to missions – that is, engineering a system of systems, (including organizations, people and technical systems) to provide desired impact on mission or capability outcomes.  Traditionally, systems of systems engineering focused on designing systems or systems of systems to achieve specified technical performance.  Mission engineering goes one step further to assess whether the system of systems, when deployed in a realistic user environment, achieves the user mission or capability objectives.  

Mission engineering applies digital model-based engineering approaches to describe the sets of activities in the form of ‘mission threads’ (or activity models) needed to execute the mission and then adds information on players and systems used to implement these activities in the form of ‘mission engineering threads.’ These digital ‘mission models’ are then implemented in operational simulations to assess how well they achieve user capability objectives. Gaps are identified and models are updated to reflect proposed changes, including reorientation of systems and insertion of new candidate solutions and which are assessed relative to changes in overall mission effectiveness.  

As stated in the US DoD Mission Engineering Guide (MEG 2.0), mission engineering uses systems and SoS in an operational mission context to inform stakeholders about building the right things, not just building things right, by guiding capability maturation to address warfighter mission needs.