Development of a Structured Approach for Establishing Mission Engineering Requirements

Abstract

This paper addresses the question: How can mission effectiveness be systematically defined or approximated in the absence of customer requirements? Legacy requirements engineering frameworks presuppose customer input to define specifications but leave a gap in the process when stakeholder input is ill-defined or missing. Rapid build and development programs (such as military acquisition, space assets, infrastructure projects, etc.) often see requirement and objective evolutions throughout the proposal process, so a more adaptive method is needed. To address this gap, a structured approach is proposed that decomposes mission intent into mission context, functions, constraints, critical dimensions, effectiveness attributes, and architecture alternatives. This method conducts a mission feasibility assessment, prioritizes mission-critical dimensions using Best-Worst Scaling, and introduces a mission complexity factor to quantitatively understand the impacts of external mission difficulties, technology maturity, evidence and confidence standards, and mission utility. The resulting method provides a traceable basis for deriving Tier 1 and 2 requirements. The approach is structured to support future Unified Architecture Framework (UAF) and Systems Modeling Language (SysML) artifact integration. The proposed framework is demonstrated using a notional close air support mission example.