Intelligent Adaptive Needs Characterization for M&S Systems Engineering

5-D Systems and the University of Texas San Antonio (UTSA) Autonomous Control Engineering (ACE) Laboratory will prototype a system concept and produce a long term development plan for a tool to intelligently assist MDA M & S Systems Engineers in understanding the needs of their stakeholders. Our prototype will address the elicitation, capture, characterization, and refinement of a stakeholder fundamental needs statement. Our approach is to apply expert decision making and evolutionary computing to the IBM Rational Unified Process (RUP) task"elicit stakeholder requests"to produce an interactive application that combines elicitation and analysis methods (interviews, workshops, brainstorming) with AI technology (fuzzy control logic, genetic programming). 5-D and UTSA will demonstrate systems engineering expertise, RUP experience, and artificial intelligence capabilities to design and develop the 5-D Stakeholder Needs Analysis Program (SNAP) tool. SNAP will enable MDA systems engineers to leverage upon expert systems to clarify, characterize, and validate their stakeholder need statements. SNAP will assist and guide the engineers through the initial phase of collecting and understanding the needs of their stakeholders by capturing inputs related to the stakeholder and their needs and prompting the engineers with intelligently formulated questions necessary to clarify and define the fundamental statement(s) of needs.