Assessing Mission Performance for Technology Reliant Missions

Abstract

Operators today increasingly rely on technology to accomplish objectives. Although technology can increase mission success and efficiency in a majority of operations, it can simultaneously increase vulnerability prevalence, resulting in a higher exploitation likelihood. Defense methods have been proposed and evaluated based on their ability to ensure network security. However, these evaluation metrics do not fully quantify how network exploitation impacts mission task completion. Our mission performance model links cyber devices to mission tasks utilizing a mission’s mission map and evaluates a mission’s performance as the proportion of completed mission tasks in an agent based simulation. Our model allows for mission mappings with varying degrees of completion to enable a generic and adaptable model. We investigate the impact differing levels of mission map completion have on the mission performance metric for the same mission. Experiments serve to provide quantitative assessment for mission performance in cyber-network mission systems.