Evolving Priorities in the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC)

Systems Conversation with Dinesh Verma, Executive Director of the Systems Engineering Research Center

The Department of Defense (DoD) determines its research needs and priorities for the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) in a variety of ways. The SERC faculty from across the 22 SERC universities and students execute the core-funded research outlined in the SERC Technical Plan, which was developed based on inputs from the Government’s Executive Advisory Board and the SERC’s Research Council. Various DoD organizations sponsor their own research tasks with the SERC based on their own organizational research priorities. The SERC periodically puts out a call for incubator tasks, where principal investigators put together a short research proposal which receives a modest amount of funding to develop a set of research findings and challenges, which may receive funding on subsequent research tasks. Although this information is helping in shaping DoD’s SE research priorities, a study was conducted in 2017 to better understand research priorities from the perspective of the technical leaders at selected and significant engineering centers within the Department of Defense, and a number of national laboratories (e.g., Sandia National Laboratories and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory). The objective of this study was to identify patterns of research that are of greatest relevance to the engineering and technical leaders at warfare centers and engineering laboratories in the Army, Navy, and Air Force, while continuing to leverage developments in systems architecting, systems thinking, systems science, model-based engineering, knowledge management, and software engineering to perform research to advance the design and development of complex systems. This talk will present the findings of the study, along with providing an overview of the SERC and its evolving research vector within the Systems Engineering Research Center.