Concept of operations and the DoD architecture framework

This thesis presents a framework for Concept of Operations (ConOps), based on the standards for capturing operations used in the government and industry. An understanding of operations early in system design is critical to the development of effective, successful systems. The current standards for Operational Concepts and the Operational Viewpoint of the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) outline lengthy descriptions that are cumbersome in the early stages of a system's development. The DoDAF Operational Viewpoint was analyzed in depth to distill the important information relevant to operations. This information was built into the System Architecture framework as a bottom-up approach of coordinating the operations of architecture, operators, and context in order to meet system goals. The resulting ConOps definition and framework was then compared against DoDAF Operational Viewpoint diagram samples in a Search and Rescue system case study, in order to validate the framework. The study found that the framework provides a shorter description with more clarity than the DoDAF diagrams.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• James, Nicholas K

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Edward F. Crawley.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119302

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/119302