Past Events › SERC Talks

Speaker:  Prof. Xavier Franch Full Professor, Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Barcelona Tech).
Abstract: Analysis of trade-offs among software quality factors needs to be based upon a clear statement of the meaning of such factors and their interrelationships...

With the adoption of Agile have started to be a viable option as evidenced in several large scale and mission critical programs, the challenges of Agile adoption have started to show up as well.

DevOps practices such as continuous integration and continuous deployment were born in the world of software development. That works with bits and bytes, but how can DevOps work with programs that produce physical systems such as satellites, fighter jets, and high-tech medical equipment?

Distributed autonomy pertains to a sociotechnical system in which geographically distributed human and software agents make independent observations, pool them to jointly determine the state of the environment, and then make collaborative decisions based on their shared goals and knowledge of environment state. This Talk presents ongoing research on adaptive cyber-physical-human system, an example of intelligent distributed autonomy. The perimeter security of a parked transport aircraft using multiple surveillance quadcopters is used as an illustrative example.

The Autonomy and Navigation Technology (ANT) Center at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) has begun development of a new Reference Architecture for Autonomy to begin to answer the myriad of needs within research, development and testing of autonomous and/or cooperative systems. This Reference Architecture will initially cater to small unmanned aerial and ground vehicles and the interfaces and operators that would be used to direct these vehicles in accomplishing tasks. The framework should be flexible to allow achievement of effective mission capabilities with autonomous and cooperative agents.

The Naval Postgraduate School and Air Force Institute of Technology have developed affordability tradeoff analysis methods employing architectural and parametric cost models applied to Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). A focus is at the interface of cost and architecture models for the automatic extraction of system size attributes from the architecture models at the levels of software, system and UAS domain product line. Costs can then be associated with architecture variants to assess tradeoffs between affordability and other ilities.
Cost models have been extended for integration with formal Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methods including SysML, Orthogonal Variability Modeling (OVM), discrete event simulation, and system behavioral modeling with Monterey Phoenix (MP). Relevant case studies for small UAS are continuing as the methods are being refined. Existing models were applied to demonstrate tradeoff analyses, and new models were created to better represent actual conditions empirically observed in practice.
The talk will overview the modeling methods and their interfaces, case studies applied to single system architectures, and current investigations with UAS domain reference architectures developed by AFIT.