Title: System and Requirements Definition Process for the Life Cycle of Space Systems at Brazilian Air Force
Abstract: The development of a system begins with the comprehension of its mission, the understanding of the expectations, and the elicitation of the needs of all stakeholders. Transforming these into a set of complete and coherent requirements is essential for the mission’s success. That is even truer in the space systems’ context, due to the high costs associated with tardiness in finding and correcting mistakes (assuming that doing so is possible). During the development or acquisition of highly-complex large-scale systems, such as space systems, processes support the transformation of the needs into requirements, leading to a holistic system solution which is also life-cycle balanced. In the Brazilian context, the National Defense Strategy (END) defines the space sector as one of the three that are essential and strategic for national defense, and the Brazilian Air Force (FAB) is the entity assigned as responsible for this sector. The FAB’s Strategic Program of Space Systems (PESE) presents the guidelines for the long-term implementation of its space systems projects. It stipulates that the definition and development of space system missions must follow the process established in the Brazilian Air Force’s guideline DCA 400-6 (“DCA 400-6 - Air Force’s Material and System Life Cycle”) and, when appropriate, other international standards. Since DCA 400-6 is a guideline with the purpose of ordaining the development or acquisition of the life cycle events of the different types of FAB’S systems, this work aims to verify its compliance with the processes internationally practiced with a focus on space systems, especially regarding the design phase and definition of requirements. Firstly, well-established international processes are identified, namely, those presented in the NASA System Engineering Handbook and INCOSE System Engineering Handbook, the ECSS-E-ST-10C and ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288 standards, and the Space Mission Engineering: The New SMAD book. Those processes, and also the DCA 400-6 and the Brazilian Defense Ministry manual (MD40-M-01) for life cycle management, are presented and analyzed. They are then compared with one another, leading to the proposition of a process compiling the activities of all of them. This allows the identification of which activities presented in DCA 400-6 are also included in the other documents and which are absent. The analysis of the conformity of the FAB’s guideline leads to the conclusion that the DCA 400-6 lacks to require essential activities for stakeholders needs identification, and for mission exploration and analysis.