Decision makers often present military researchers with a most daunting challenge: to pursue, with some level of prophetic certainty, innovative concepts that will yield increased capabilities during future wars against forecasted threats in not-yet- determined locations. This conundrum is complicated further with the requirement that the proposed technology yield benefit throughout the various strata of military operations. In the maturation of an advanced capability enabled by a technological advancement, a groundbreaking design should simultaneously demonstrate performance overmatch against an envisioned foe while showing that the costs associated with development, procurement, and operation outweigh reverting to an incremental advancement in the conventional means of delivering combat power. This manuscript focuses on the construction and utilization of decision support tools for use by scientists and engineers charged with providing a quantitative evaluation of an advanced ground combat system. The concepts presented focus on the effects and synergy regarding the combat vehicle principal attributes of survivability, lethality, and mobility. Additionally, this study provides a framework for analysis of these attributes when screened at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war. These concepts are presented and demonstrated from both the candidate selection (or choice) perspective, and the concept development (or design) perspective. As an example of this approach, this study includes a comparison of conventional powder gun cannonry versus a specific type of electromagnetic launch device known as the railgun. The decision support tools formulated in this dissertation allow the user to distill, at a coarse level of fidelity, the parametric relationships between system survivability, lethality, and mobility for advanced weapon system concepts. The proposed methods are suited for evaluation at the nascent stages of development, when the information normally applied in standard methods is sparse. This general approach may also be valuable in contemporary acquisition strategies employed in urgent fielding efforts, where the immediacy of the problem can benefit from an expedient and efficient method of analyzing the coupled and synergistic effects of implementing a proposed technology. While advantage is typically measured in terms of performance overmatch at the platform level, the broadening of this consideration vertically to higher levels of military command can aid in identifying the competing issues and complementary relationships related to a technical approach. Finally, given the backdrop demonstration for the framework, this manuscript may serve as a brief summary of system fundamentals and design theory for direct fire powder gun cannonry and electromagnetic railguns. / text

Maintaining large-scale legacy applications has been a major challenge for software producers. As the application evolves and gets more complicated, it becomes harder to understand, debug, or modify the code. Moreover, as new members are joining the development team, and others are leaving, the need for a well-documented code arises. Good documentation necessitates the visualization of the code in an easy to understand manner. The Unified Modeling Language (UML), an Object Management Group's (OMG) standard, is a graphical modeling language used for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting software intensive artifacts. UML, which has been accepted as an industry standard in November 1997, has aided the design and maintenance of object-oriented legacy applications. While the software developers were building UML models for their existing applications as part of a reverse-engineering process, development of next generation software applications started from the models (forward-engineering process). In the forward engineering process, the system's code is specified and constructed from the UML models, which evolve as the system evolves in order to maintain consistent documentation and visualization of the system. Moreover, UML has the power of hiding unnecessary details of the system by the ability to model its different views. This enables visualizing the system at different levels of hierarchy. This thesis documents how to use UML to model a software-intensive simulation for the combat systems of a fully automated naval "digital ship". This process started with building the use case diagrams based on the system requirements given by the domain experts. Then activity diagrams were used to describe the exact performance of the use cases. The logical view of the system was built using class, interaction, and activity diagrams. Then, the physical view of the system was built using component diagrams. Finally, an example of the code generation process from the UML models was carried out for one of the system components. These models are to be maintained as the application evolves. Using UML has aided in building a well-structured object-oriented application, validating the use cases of the application with the domain experts, visualizing and validating the structure of the source code before writing it, communicating between different members of the development team, and providing an easily understandable documentation of the system. / Master of Science