System of Systems Design Analysis and Exploration Using a Unified Mission Ontology

The Unified Mission Ontology (UMO), previously introduced as a comprehensive mission ontology, aims to formalize mission concepts, offering a unified approach to mission representation, design, and analysis. This paper analyzes the UMO through three research questions: its effectiveness in representing domain-specific applications, its impact on improving mission-centric processes, and its facilitation of design space exploration. Our analysis is demonstrated in the context of an automated quarry application that exhibits key characteristics of a system of systems (SoS). Our findings provide valuable insights into UMO's potential for domain-specific applications, offering recommendations for its refinement, and highlighting its contributions to the development of efficient and interoperable ontologies for mission-centric design and analysis.