Systems Engineering Techniques to Support Monitoring Data Analysis1

Arms control monitoring regimes gather data to assist one or more Treaty Partners in assessing whether anotherTreaty Partner is in compliance with its obligations. A monitoring regime may include some form of continuousmonitoring, on-site inspections as well as other measures. This paper focuses on the portions of a notionalregime that utilize cooperative continuous monitoring and on-site inspections and the ways in which systemsengineering techniques can enhance the design of these monitoring regime elements to ensure monitoringobjectives are met. The paper describes two example monitoring problems: determining if the number of TreatyAccountable Items (TAI) geographically distributed across an enterprise is within a prescribed limit anddetermining if a TAI was dismantled. Systems engineering and systems analysis use several different types ofsystem models to ensure a system design implements defined requirements and objectives. These models canrange from different types of diagrams to dynamic simulation models. This paper analyzes these monitoringproblems with three such techniques:(1) a functional decomposition which breaks high-level monitoring functions down into a hierarchy ofconstituent sub-functions. The lowest level functions can be related to specific measurements and datacollected by the monitoring regime(2) an activity diagram which describes how the different elements and actors interact within amonitoring process(3) decision/event trees that show how information is combined to reach a monitoring conclusion andhow uncertainties may propagate through that process.These approaches enable traceability from monitoring objectives down to specific technology selections andprocedural choices, ensuring that monitoring systems gather sufficient data to draw needed conclusions whilenot gathering data outside of the regime.