Keywords

1 Introduction

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. John F. Kennedy [1]

The use of Grand Challenges to focus technical efforts is not new. One could argue that the construction of the Grand Pyramid of Giza over a period of 20 years in the time of 2500 BCE represented such a systems engineering Grand Challenge, as did the other Seven Wonders of the World. Much more recently, in 1900, David Hilbert, a famous mathematician, formulated the now-canonical “23 Problems of Hilbert” that served to focus the efforts of mathematics in the twentieth century [2]. John F. Kennedy provided the same inspiration and focus with the race to the moon that provided a focal point for so many technical fields in the 1960s, establishing the basis for Moore’s law [3] in electronics whose exponential advances have shaped our present world. Other Grand Challenges, such as in global health, have been funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [4] with the objective of focusing science and technology on accelerated developments against diseases that affect the developing world. The National Academy of Engineering has also created a list of 14 Grand Challenges in a diverse set of areas in critical technical areas [5]. Other challenges include those from XPRIZE [6], Longitude Prize [7], and the Grand Challenges of Social Work [8].More specifically in the area of systems engineering, Kalawsky proposed research in the five defined areas in systems engineering[9].

This project was established by the Academic Council of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE). The Academic Council is a branch of the INCOSE Corporate Advisory Board facilitating discussion and exploration of issues relevant to academia and setting a path for achievement supported by strategic collaborations.

The project utilizes the approach described in the publication, “A World in Motion: Systems Engineering Vision 2025” [10], which uses a framework coupling societal needs to systems challenges and then to gaps in the capabilities of systems engineering. Primary references for this work are in the NAE Grand Challenges [5] and the World Economic Forum’s “The Global Risks Report” [11]. The objectives of this project are to:

  • Build communities among academia, industry, and government from numerous domains, expanding beyond defense/aerospace, dedicated to tackling the major global systems challenges confronting humankind for societal good

  • Excite, inspire, and guide SE research in these communities

  • Achieve consensus among these communities to establish the priorities of SE research

  • Provide the means by which to create synergy in these SE research efforts such that progress can be measured against these objectives

2 Project Structure

As described in [10], this project will (1) couple societal needs to systems Grand Challenges, (2) determine the gaps in systems engineering and science necessary to address these challenges, and from this analysis, and (3) determine critical areas of systems research, resulting in a proposal for a roadmap of systems research. This project will be conducted as a series of workshops, with each workshop focused on one of these critical areas, building a connection to the next workshop. The workshops will be moderate in size with 35–50 attendees representing academia, government, and industry from a range of domains beyond the traditional domain of DoD/aerospace. Tentatively, the project will consist of three workshops, followed by a symposium, perhaps coincidental with the INCOSE International Symposium (IS).The tentative foci of the three workshops are:

  • Workshop I: Review the program framework (based on the INCOSE SE Vision 2025) and define a set of high-level societal needs and Grand Challenges to provide focus for the SE research. The workshop was conducted at Johns Hopkins University Advanced Physics Laboratory on October 12–13, 2016.The results were presented at the 2017 INCOSE International Workshop.

  • Workshop II: Determine the SE capabilities and gaps necessary to address the Grand Challenges defined in Workshop I. Scheduled for March 22, 2017, preceding the Conference on Systems Engineering Research (CSER) held at USC.

  • Workshop III: Determine the areas of research necessary to address the SE capabilities and gaps defined in Workshop II. Tentatively scheduled for early summer 2017.

  • Symposium: Communicate the results of the SE research and kick off community building efforts at INCOSE International Symposium July 17–20, 2017 in Adelaide, Australia.

This paper focuses on the results of Workshop I which is on the identification of societal needs and the specification of Grand Challenges necessary to address them.

3 Workshop I

Approximately 35 attendees who are known to be thought leaders in systems and engineering were invited from industry, government, and academia. The workshop was comprised of four breakout sections, each composed of 6–8 attendees to address a separate domain of interest. Participants in this workshop were encouraged to rank in order their interest in the societal needs from the SE Vision 2025 as noted below. The responses were scored with 7 points for the first choice, 6 points for the second choice, and so on. The four bolded societal needs areas noted below were selected. The nonselected areas may be revisited in future academic research forum discussions. Based on this, participants were assigned to groups and were notified prior to attending the workshop:

  • Food and clean water – selected

  • Healthy (physical) environment

  • Access to healthcare – selected

  • Access to education – selected

  • Access to information and communication

  • Transportation and mobility

  • Security and safety (physical and cyber) – selected

  • Others (attendee’s choice)

The workshop was initiated by keynote presentations by Kristen Baldwin, Dennis Buede, and Rick Adcock, describing the Grand Challenges of national security, industry, and academia, respectively. Then each breakout group spent the afternoon of Day 1 describing their area of focus in their selected societal needs domains. At the end of Day 1, each group presented their results to the rest of the participants for comments and feedback. On Day 2, each breakout group refined their area of focus and formulated a description of a systems Grand Challenge necessary to address the described societal needs.

The following are the desired characteristics of the societal needs Grand Challenges [12]:

  1. 1.

    Represent complex and extremely difficult questions that are solvable (potentially within 10–20 years).

  2. 2.

    Improve quality of life through positive educational, social, and economic outcome potentially affecting millions of people.

  3. 3.

    Involve multiple research projects across many subdisciplines to be satisfactorily addressed.

  4. 4.

    Require measurable outcomes so that progress and completion can be identified.

  5. 5.

    Compel popular support by encouraging the public to relate to, understand, and appreciate the outcomes of the effort.

To this list, we add the requirement that the Grand Challenges are systemic in nature and cannot be solved by technology alone. The results of the workshop are described below.

4 Workshop I Results

4.1 Clean Water

4.1.1 Grand Challenge

After deciding to focus entirely on clean water, this group determined their Grand Challenge to be: Ensure that economical access to locally sourced, clean water necessary for survival and limited prosperity (as a minimum requirement) is available to everyone. A number of actions need to be taken to achieve this objective addressing water quantity, quality, and location. Innovation is necessary to create new methods to develop water availability. Appropriate weather responses need to be made to ensure that the available freshwater is preserved for use. Actions need to be taken to prevent the decline of water quality. Water supplies need to be made secure, ensuring that hostile entities are not able to have a negative effect. It will be critical to work cooperatively with commercial entities in these areas.

4.1.2 Problem Definition

Four billion people have an inadequate water supply at least part of the year [13]. Several “water problem types ” need to be considered to explore this, including scarce water, plentiful but contaminated water, or seasonal water presence. Contamination might be created from both natural- and human-caused events, the latter from unintended and intended actions. Due to the wide variation in freshwater supply challenges, there is no single solution that can address the Grand Challenge in all environments. Hence, the solution sets will need to be context aware, meeting the specific sociotechnical conditions in each locale.

4.1.3 Desired Results

The challenge set by this group is focused on a minimum set of outcomes, which take the lack of clean water out of the critical path for other economic development concerns. Non-contaminated water is available to everyone from local sources, generated in a way that is environmentally friendly. The solution sets will be scaled to target population requirements and cleanliness standards. The solution sets will avoid requiring capital-intensive new infrastructure or reliance on existing transportation systems for everyone. The solution sets must be feasible, cost-effective, and adapted to the region. Note that other clean water-related issues such as access to external supplies, decisions as to where to build new developments, etc. could also be considered by more developed nations but are outside of the scope of the challenge set by this workshop.

4.1.4 Obstacles

Geopolitical, cultural, and other social factors may inhibit required local collaboration and cooperation to implement solutions. Privacy issues may reduce the ability to collect necessary data needed to implement solution sets. Political turmoil, social unrest, corruption, and the lack of a stable governing body can all greatly reduce the ability to positively affect change. Extreme poverty and the lack of a viable economy may retard the deployment of viable systems. Cultural reluctance to embrace externally generated solutions may prevent adoption. People may be residing in areas that have dwindling or nonexistent water supplies due to climate change. Finally, adequate models do not exist to adequately support the interdependencies of this complex systems problem.

4.1.5 Research Questions

The group identified a number of research questions including:

  • Can a systems of systems model to simulate contamination of water sources be developed to support option generation and decision-making, including the following:

    • Man-made or natural, intentional or unintentional, contamination of global water sources

    • Continental, regional, state, territorial, or tribal scale

  • Can the solution sets incorporate policies and regulatory guidelines and include measurable outcomes?

  • Can tabletop exercises be developed that show factors such as response time, recovery achieved (percent as partial, total, etc.), resulting cost, etc.?

4.2 Healthcare

4.2.1 Grand Challenge

The group identified a number of specific challenges with the provision of healthcare and more generally with the difficulty of considering this type of challenge at a national or international level. Given this, the group identified the following generic challenge: How can we frame the issues around healthcare as a system in such a way that they can be considered at a national or international level? The discussions of this challenge focused on understanding an enterprise such as healthcare, which is judged not only as a complex human and technology system but also within the context of the society within which the assessment is being made.

4.2.2 Problem Definition

The following working definition of healthcare was created:

The ability to restore or maintain the health of the mind and body of citizens of a society – this includes well-being, treatment, and social care – applied to individuals, groups, society, etc.

All of the terms in bold above would need to be further defined, and this definition depends on the social context in which healthcare sits. A number of specific healthcare challenges were discussed, including:

  1. 1.

    How to ensure a basic level of health within the community of a developing country, sufficient to allow other aspects of social and economic growth.

  2. 2.

    How to provide adequate social care to members of the society, in particular, one in which nutrition, prevention, and treatment have led to an increasing number of people in need of such care to maintain quality of life.

  3. 3.

    How to balance a basic level of health maintenance across a society with the ability to offer a full range of available healthcare for those more able to bear some or all of the cost.

  4. 4.

    How to ensure the correct balance between self-care, e.g., good diet, regular exercise, health monitoring, etc., and regulated social care.

While any of these could form Grand Challenge themes, the workshop group decided to focus on the generic issue of understanding such questions in a broad social context.

The workshop group used the term socioeconomic enterprise as a working label of something of the scope and complexity of healthcare; see “Obstacles” section below. Such an enterprise must have a scope which covers all aspects of its outcomes, e.g., medical care and individual responsibility. It must be able to balance finite resources and make trade-offs acceptable within the social context in which it sits. It must deal with the human and technical complexity of integrating and operating multiple service systems, e.g., combining well-established clinical practices with a wide range of technologies. It also needs to remain viable when faced with all of the environmental factors and possible threats which exist now and in the future in the defined context.

4.2.3 Desired Results

The desired results would be the resolution of a number of social, technical, and economic outcomes. Society begins to think of healthcare as an overall system, considering the complexity of all the issues raised and making balanced judgments. This provides the basis to integrate all the disparate pieces of our healthcare enterprise, ensuring all component parts can operate effectively but gain additional value from considering it as a whole. We obtain and make clear an accessible appropriate information about all aspects of healthcare: individual status, best evidence, options, trade-offs, and associated costs. Through this, we drive investment and research activity better to improve the quality of health and decrease the cost over time.

4.2.4 Obstacles

The group spent some time considering the systemic nature of a challenge such as healthcare. Healthcare delivery is provided by a number of related “sociotechnical” systems (systems combining people and technology toward a socially or commercially agreed goal or service). Many of these could be described as “cyber-physical service systems” (physical systems in which software and communications technology play a key role in how the system works, often allowing for open flexible elements to be brought together by the end user at the point of operation to provide services) and “systems of systems” (in which, alongside the issues of technical and human integration, we must deal with component systems with independent missions, owners, and change cycles).The above simplified definitions are based on the SE Body of Knowledge [14].

In general, it was thought that such systems not only face significant issues in overcoming technical and human integration issues, but also that it is difficult for the society in which they sit to agree on the relative value of the services they provide and to correctly assign the necessary resources to achieve those values.

The challenges of integrating the elements of “cyber-physical systems” and “systems of systems” are already documented. In healthcare, this will be further complicated by the need to work within established clinical and public health practices. Many of these practices are based upon technological constraints which may no longer exist but which are difficult to untangle from current ways of working.

This is an example of a wicked problem [15] and as such all possible solutions have both positive and negative outcomes. In the face of this complexity, it is also very difficult to have a “grown-up conversation” about them and to avoid political or commercial interest groups setting the agenda for such discussions.

4.2.5 Research Questions

From the discussions above, the group identified the following initial research questions:

  1. 1.

    How to model a socioeconomic enterprise such as healthcare in a way that fully explores missions, context, environment, interacting elements, etc., and is accessible to a wider community to facilitate a balanced conversation.

  2. 2.

    How to use this understanding to set goals, incentives, and priorities and use these to drive and measure change.

  3. 3.

    What are the ways of describing such an enterprise using system architecture models and using this to significantly improve integration both within and across the component systems.

  4. 4.

    How to take particular views of the enterprise, for example, information sharing and use, performance, people and skills, resilience and security, etc., and use these to generate options for change.

  5. 5.

    How to identify ways to assess the architectures and options in 3 and 4 above against the measures described in 2 and in the context of broader understanding established by 1.

All of these use aspects of existing SE but apply them to a scale, complexity, community, etc. not currently considered.

4.3 Education

4.3.1 Grand Challenge

The group identified a single, broad Grand Challenge in education which is to reform education systems to address gaps in systems skills in individuals. In this case, systems skills include a very detailed set of knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) including technical, managerial, professional, and crossdisciplinary per the INCOSE competency framework categories currently being developed. This Grand Challenge is a superset of the three major SE Vision 2025 goals of ensuring that all systems decision-makers are systems thinkers, that all engineers have systems engineering skills, and that all systems engineers are broad-based, technical leaders. Achieving this Grand Challenge will require the identification of an appropriate set of systems skills supporting societal needs, a determination of the skill gaps in existing workforce and graduates and the systematic reform of the education system to address those gaps.

4.3.2 Problem Definition

There are numerous critical issues in education systems throughout the world, with specific problems depending on the specific context. In many cases, current education systems were developed to support the needs of early industrialization and are far short of providing students with the KSAs that are required in today’s information-based, networked societies. In addition, education systems often do not provide their students with the capability of working together effectively with an appreciation of diversity of gender, backgrounds, environments, and technology. While our societies at both the local and global levels are becoming more tightly interconnected as systems of systems, current education systems generally are not systems aware and do not instill systems literacy in their students. Finally, education systems tend to be quite resistant to change and are often constrained by entrenched constituencies and bureaucracy.

4.3.3 Desired Results

The desired result is that students increasingly (up through graduation and on the job) are capable of providing immediate and long-lasting benefit to society, can work collaboratively with individuals of diverse backgrounds and environments, have a systems perspective, and have professional skills such as ethics, communications, leadership, and followership. To make this possible, everyone associated with education will have the necessary KSAs, tools, and techniques to make sense of society and how they can provide immediate and long-lasting value. These educational capabilities need to be supported with the ability to effectively assess the level of KSAs in students and citizens, and the means by which to make this available to a populace willing to use these results for their own betterments. Finally, society will have the ability to use systems methods to better understand and appreciate diverse value systems, thus facilitating collaborative work in our networked society.

4.3.4 Obstacles

Education systems are perhaps one of the most difficult systems to change due to the size and scale of often entrenched bureaucracies that support them, the long lag time between change initiation and effected change in the resultant workforce, the often conflicting objectives of the various stakeholders, and the difficulty in measuring educational results and effectiveness. Unfortunately, this is the case where attempts to measure educational results change the education process as evidenced by standardized testing in the United States. There are numerous obstacles including the fact that society does not have a common understanding of the concept of systems, does not think in a systems manner, and may not recognize the advantage of this approach. Industry and government may not be willing to share KSA information in a form that is readily useful, and even if there is a will, privacy issues may restrict the ability to collect data. Legacy education systems are often very complex, are distributed, and are resistant to change. Finally, major changes may be necessary as the current education system is inadequate in preparing graduates to provide immediate and long-term value to society.

4.3.5 Research Questions

There are numerous research questions that arise based on the aforementioned Grand Challenge objectives and the obstacles noted above. Questions range from the ability to determine KSAs that we need based on the global and local contexts, how they can be taught and evaluated, and how education systems can be changed and made adaptive and resilient. The following are examples of some specific research questions:

  • Do systems skills result in better SEs, engineers, and citizens?

  • Is it possible to define the systems skills and KSAs that cover all the roles that an SE, engineer, or citizen may take?

  • How dependent is this on cultural and societal value systems?

  • Is it possible to unambiguously determine the gap between education and desired KSAs? If so, is it possible to define a course of study/training/internship to address these?

  • Is it possible to effectively and efficiently determine the means by which to evaluate someone’s capabilities with respect to each KSA?

  • Is it possible to assemble an education system with the materials, tools, staff, and organizations to support the desired actions and outcomes?

  • Does a project team-based curriculum, based on multidisciplinary systems thinking, result in learning that is better than current learning as evaluated by standardized assessment?

  • How can “internship” concepts and best practices be used effectively throughout the educational process (from cradle to grave)?

  • How effectively can the educational process be studied and modeled as a system?

  • How can lifelong educational and training systems be updated and made to be resilient and adaptive?

4.4 Security and Safety

4.4.1 Grand Challenges

The group identified two Grand Challenges , which were both derived from the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Grand Challenges Prevent Nuclear Terror and Secure Cyberspace. These were generalized as resilience to catastrophic events and systemic security. For the first, the generalization of resilience to catastrophic events represents the need for systems engineering methods, processes, and tools that adequately capture both the system and its external context, in order to address systemic effects. Because such events are necessarily addressed by combined policy, economic, and technical strategies, future systems engineering tools must capture both technical and nontechnical solution sets. For the second, there is a recognition that the traditional methods of hierarchical decomposition of structure and associated perimeter defense strategies are no longer valid. Future systems engineering tools need to consider the heterarchical nature of cyber systems and their context.

4.4.2 Problem Definition

The advancement of technology and information access has lowered threat barriers to entry, and security challenges are diffusing across all domains (many of which have not been designed to be secure). There is a need to reevaluate how we design systems in response to real and potential threats. Here we define a threat in a general sense: anything that would disrupt, damage, or destroy the system or its stakeholders. Systems that were developed without any consideration of operational threats now are being disrupted, and systems are being used by threat actors in ways that were never intended uses of the system. Thus the consideration of system response to threats in the development phase has become a necessary process across many domains that have no experience with safe and secure design strategies.

Uncertainty and rapid change in the threat environment prevent a requirement-driven process that produces static design strategies. Future systems need to be designed for agility in response to context-driven changes, resilience to threat intrusions and cascading failure modes, and the ability to gracefully degrade or self-heal in response to unintended use. The knowledge of system interfaces at every level needs to persist for the life of the system and reflect the current state of operation. Methods and tools must support greenfield (new) and brownfield (existing) implementations.

This is a policy, economics, and technology problem, and today we don’t effectively systems engineer models of the system and its external context. Scenarios and concept of operations used to develop the systems need to cover and persist at every level of the design and across many external context drivers. Today, we don’t have a systems language that spans engineering, policy, and economic concerns.

4.4.3 Desired Results

The future state of systems engineering will capture system security value and risk metrics into all types of systems and all levels and phases of decision analysis. In order to make effective decisions, systems engineering methods, processes, and tools will span the engineering, economics, and policy domains. Best practices from systems engineering (technology driven) and engineering design (user experience driven) will be merged so that all systems balance solutions and external context drivers.

Systems engineering as a whole will “catch up” so that we can engineer system solutions at the speed of the threats we see today. System models will reflect all system behaviors, be adaptive, and be able to evaluate systemic effects both within the system and out to external use contexts. Continuous experimentation with system vulnerabilities and threat scenarios (red and blue teams) will become a standard part of SE at all phases of design, integration, test, and deployment. Model-based systems knowledge of both the system and current context will always reflect the current states of the system and its history.

Threat actors and environmental threats will always be attacking, exploiting, or otherwise systemically changing the context of systems and new technologies. In the future, systems will be designed to adapt to these threats instead of reacting to them.

4.4.4 Obstacles

Safety and security are crosscutting concerns, and they affect system engineering both at scale and in decomposition to components. Current processes are not agile with respect to external context changes and do not keep up with the knowledge developed as the system matures in its intended and emergent uses. Knowledge capture of design is not connected to knowledge capture of experience. Static requirements, hierarchical decomposition, and a point design mentality are ingrained in the systems engineering mindset, while system uses of today are continually changing and exhibit self-adapting behaviors that are decidedly nonhierarchical. But existing mindsets and historical processes are difficult to change.

These Grand Challenges are fundamentally technology, policy, and economic issues. We do not have a “language” today that allows different domains (engineering, policy, economics, etc.) to communicate. Thus, stakeholder decisions at every level are poorly informed and driven by self-interests. Engineering is still decidedly non-holistic in its perspectives, and this is instilled at every level of engineering education.

4.4.5 Research Questions

The group identified a number of research questions in the discussion. Many of these reflect the need for general methods to address systemic threats and change, not just safety and security engineering processes. A general call for research that increases holism and interdisciplinary design is needed, as well as the following specific questions :

  • How do we categorize security- and safety-related challenges? Structural decomposition methods no longer work.

  • How do you characterize capabilities and gaps in this domain?

  • Are there methods and tools that can address simultaneously the human, physical, and informational aspects of the system?

  • Can we address uncertainty in the system analysis process, particularly uncertainty of external system drivers?

  • Is it possible to model real-time, realistic operational environments of changing systems and changing contexts?

  • How can we design governance methods for ensuring system security when the individual components are not secure, effectively moving to heterarchical system structures?

  • How do you “reverse engineer” the architecture of an existing system in order to learn its interfaces and potential vulnerabilities, particularly brownfield systems (power grids, etc.)?

  • How do you measure what you don’t know and plan to evolve as the system scales?

  • How do you expose the necessary information to monitor system security in a private way?

  • How do you design a system to self-analyze failures and heal itself?

  • How can systems engineering education engage the different domains at this level of design?

5 Conclusion

Overall, this workshop succeeded in its main aim of validating the planned workshop approach and the use of Grand Challenges to focus future SE research questions. While all of the groups took different approaches, a broad consensus emerged on the types of research questions raised, in particular:

  • Ways to model complex situations as systems and use this to improve understanding

  • Ways to extend SE approaches to system integration and option assessment, to relate to the scale of challenges faced in considering solutions

  • Ways to consider complex emergent issues across such solutions

The idea of a socioeconomic enterprise discussed in Sect. 81.4.2 may provide a generic context into which many of the Grand Challenge themes could be placed setting a scope which covers all aspects of its outcomes whoever they are delivered by. Such enterprises must consider the balance of finite resources and tradeoffs across the full scope, how to set the necessary level of human and technical integration, and the need to remain viable within environmental factors and possible threats. All decisions in such an enterprise must consider what is acceptable within the social context in which they sit or working to change the views within such a context.

Such a way of looking at national and global challenges might help to focus on issues for which SE can provide answers and to create research challenges to help drive the ongoing transformation of SE as a professional discipline. In our future work in workshops 2 and 3, we will explore these possibilities.