Evaluation and Testing in Operational Environments: Accelerating Development Cycles for Maritime Unmanned Systems

According to Martec’s Law, technology is evolving exponentially, while organizations are evolving logarithmically. These two trends present unprecedent challenges to the development of future maritime unmanned vehicle systems (MUS). This is exacerbated by the fact that we are also witnessing a paradigm change in MUS, from the operation of vehicles to the operation of systems of systems (SoS), delivering unprecedented capabilities and powered by recent developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Here, we discuss the impact of these trends on technological and organizational development from the perspective of the increasing role of evaluation and testing in operational environments. This is carried out in the framework of systems engineering, with reference to three illustrative case studies and required advances, to highlight the impact of the paradigm change on the development and deployment of SoS. SoS will have both and fast development scales, thus requiring fast development models that can only be achieved by streamlining modeling, simulation, and operational experimentation processes.