Mission-based Architecture for Swarm Composability (MASC)

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm design and mission application is a burgeoning area of research. The applications of swarm technology to unmanned systems are in the infancy of realization, although clear benefits from the enhanced capabilities can be easily envisioned for commercial and government missions including persistent search, long-term monitoring, sensor data collection, object retrieval, and offensive attack missions. Designing a UAV swarm architecture without considering the mission doctrine is imprudent, as is developing a mission doctrine without understanding the unique capabilities of swarm technology. This paper provides a literature review of current UAV swarm design architectures, most of which employ bottom-up methods with little consideration for an intended operational mission. The proposed top-down framework and modeling approach is focused on developing a modular UAV swarm playbook-type architecture by decomposing a subset of US Navy missions, and developing tactics that can be applied to those missions and support future missions. The framework proposed herein is derived from a consolidation of heuristics from the model-based systems engineering, robotics, human systems integration, biology, and computer science disciplines. The goal of this framework is to provide a standard methodology for designing and operating swarm unmanned systems that will meet the performance requirements for military missions. In this paper, an integrated framework for designing a UAV swarm system with swarm mission doctrine as a primary design factor is presented.