Research Summaries

Back Multidisciplinary Energy Studies Support for USMC Expeditionary Energy Office (E2O): Systems Engineering Analysis and Modeling & Simulation of Small

Fiscal Year 2019
Division Graduate School of Engineering & Applied Science
Department Systems Engineering
Investigator(s) Hernandez, Alejandro D.S.
Sponsor U.S. Marine Corps - Expeditionary Energy Office (Marine Corps)
Summary USMC requires a full range of analytical expertise, to include operations research; systems engineering; technical research and analysis; as well as business, management and policy analysis to support the E2O program goals. The proposed effort leverages the academic and research expertise, resources, and capabilities that reside at NPS. Led by the core team of NPS faculty in this proposal, this effort taps NPS expertise, student operational experience, and communities of interest for energy-related research and education to address small unit power requirements. The technical efforts in this research will investigate small unit power requirements on two lines of analysis (LOA): LOA 1 – Systems Engineering and System Thinking, LOA 2 – Computer Simulation and Experimentation.
LOA 1 – Systems Engineering and System Thinking. This effort assumes that the mission profiles that exist in IPOWER are incorrect. As such, the NPS team will apply a systems engineering and system thinking approach to identify representative sets of current and future small unit constructs, equipment sets, and mission profiles that the current and future Marine Corps strategy require. Through the use of currently available modeling tools to define power usage profiles for small units, the team will develop the power and energy demands for specified mission profiles. The team will deterministically compute the power generation and storage capabilities of current and future systems. These calculations will establish a baseline that can be used for further studies.
The research will primarily focus on definition of operating conditions to facilitate an in depth analysis of the duty cycle dependent energy requirements of squad (and potentially platoon) sized USMC elements. In support of that broader objective, this research has the following specific objectives:
- Definition of a set of mission profiles/mission blocks and operating conditions relevant to both current and future USMC small unit operations
- Definition of a comprehensive systems architecture that captures the operational activities and system elements associated with USMC small unit operations. Alternatively stated, this research will produce standardized representations of what the units will do (operational activities) and what will be used to do it (system elements). This architecture will include identification of dependencies on unit composition and operating environment.
- Coordination with other team members can result of this effort to support the development and analysis of an operational simulation to identify key performance drivers (in terms of operational activities and system elements) that inform comparisons of duty cycle dependent operational frameworks.
LOA 2 – Computer Simulation and Experimentation. In this effort, the NPS team will assume that the mission profiles in IPOWER are correct and model them in a constructive computer simulation. In this environment, the team will simulate the operations of a small unit that is executing one or more mission profiles. The simulation model will possess a stochastic nature. Through experimentation, the team can develop power curves that correspond with different mission profiles and constructs. The team will perform a comparative analyses of supply and demand. Excursions to assess possible future technology capabilities against different mission profiles can inform the development of new systems. The following is an overview of the proposed work.
- The NPS team will study how to incorporate IPOWER data into the constructive simulation. The team must understand how the IPOWER mission profiles are modeled into the simulation. This effort requires access and full communication between the IPOWER developer and subject matter experts.
Keywords Simulation Experiments Small Unit Power Requirements systems thinking
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal