Wildfires are extremely difficult to manage and control. When they grow out of control, countless natural assets, properties, and even entire populations are destroyed. Over the years, allocation of resources and improvement of tactics have been focused on improving reactive capabilities. However, adopting a proactive approach can reduce reaction time and the necessary resources when action is needed for suppressing a fire.

Both the proactive and reactive phases of wildfire management involve numerous systems that need to work together with seamless communication and collaboration. When a heterogeneous collection of systems under different management communicates and collaborates towards a goal, it is beneficial to consider them as a whole System of Systems. This thesis takes a System of Systems approach to wildfire management and examines modelling and simulation considerations, with special interest in methods that can be used to obtain a refined design space for new systems. More specifically, new system requirements for the generation of new concepts of firefighting aerial vehicles.

Additionally, the thesis considers stakeholders’ needs, interests, concerns and viewpoints, which are necessary for developing high-level concepts of operations for the new systems to be included in the System of Systems. These topics are sometimes overlooked, yet necessary to keep communities engaged and to develop measures of effectiveness and performance that capture the value of different System of Systems combinations. All these considerations are aimed at contributing to the improvement of holistic requirement generation for product development of new aircraft.

Skogsbränder är mycket svåra att hantera och kontrollera. När de växer utom kontroll kan många naturområden, byggnader och till och med hela samhällen förstöras. Under åren har de flesta insatser inom resursfördelning och taktik fokuserat på att förbättra hur vi agerar vid bränder. Att använda ett mer proaktivt angreppssätt kan dock minska både responstiden och mängden resurser som behövs när bränder måste bekämpas.

Både de proaktiva och reaktiva delarna av skogsbrandshantering omfattar många olika system som behöver arbeta tillsammans, med smidig kommunikation och samordning. När en mångsidig uppsättning system, som även hanteras av olika organisationer, samarbetar mot ett gemensamt mål är det användbart att betrakta dem som ett system av system. Denna avhandling ger ett system av system-perspektiv på skogsbrandshantering och studerar frågor relaterade till modellering och simulering, med särskilt fokus på metoder som hjälper till att definiera ett mer avgränsat designutrymme för nya system. Mer specifikt undersöks hur nya systemkrav kan definieras för att skapa nya koncept för brandbekämpningsflygplan.

Dessutom beaktar avhandlingen behov, intressen, farhågor och perspektiv hos de intressenter som är direkt involverade i verksamheten. Dessa överväganden är viktiga för att utveckla operationskoncept för nya system som ska ingå i ett större system av system sammanhang. Dessa aspekter tas inte alltid i åtanke, men de är nödvändiga för att hålla samhällen engagerade och för att utveckla mått på effektivitet och prestanda som speglar värdet av olika kombinationer av system av system. Tillsammans syftar dessa insatser till att förbättra hur övergripande krav definieras vid utvecklingen av nya flygplan.

System of Systems Engineering (SoSE) studies how independent constituent sys-tems interact to generate emergent capabilities. However, it is challenging linking the studyoperations and SoSE to software implementation and agent-based simulations. This paperconsiders communication as the primary architectural concern and examines how softwarearchitectures can improve SoS modelling and simulation. In particular, by relating soft-ware architectures to Observe–Orient–Decide–Act (OODA) loops, which are a promisingstructure for aligning communication, decision logic, and agent interactions with modularand traceable agent architectures. The goal of this work is to explore how communicationwithin SoS architectures can be better structured, represented, and analysed through soft-ware engineering and agent-based modelling frameworks in the context of hierarchical andcooperative operational environments, where information exchange directly influences sys-tem performance and emergent outcomes.

Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation (ABMS) is widely used in System-of-Systems (SoS) studies to represent constituent systems operating in dynamic environments.However, the absence of standardised agent architectures hinders scalability, behaviour trace-ability, and comparative evaluation of emergence, coordination, and operational perfor-mance. This work introduces a modular agent design based on Observe–Orient–Decide–Act(OODA) loops as a framework for SoS simulations, enabling transparent information flow andArtificial Intelligence (AI) integration at the decision layer. A wildfire suppression scenariois used for the study, modelling firefighting crews, aircraft, helicopters, bulldozers, and anincident commander as OODA-driven agents. Results show that OODA-based agents exhibitcoherent and traceable team behaviours, adaptive task switching, and communication-drivencoordination, supporting the study of emergence and interoperability in SoS operations. TheDecision stage is designed for future improvements in the form of learning-based AI and LargeLanguage Models to enhance autonomy and operational fidelity.

Conceptual design of aircraft tailored for a specific role requires a holistic view to account for requirements atdifferent levels, from systems to sub-systems and their components. This is the case with aircraft designedfor firefighting, where they collaborate and communicate with other systems towards a common goal. Thiscollaborative and holistic perspective is what a System of System (SoS) analysis tries to achieve. To conduct aSoS analysis, the use of Agent-Based Modelling and Simulations (ABMSs) is widely adopted. A crucial aspectof this approach is the ability to capture emergent behaviours that arise from collaborative systems, whichare represented in the Agent-Based Simulation (ABS) by agents whose actions are traditionally governed bydecision trees. The present study introduces a novel methodology using ABMS where a Large Language Model(LLM) plays the role of a human in the loop. The purpose is to represent the decision-making of an IncidentCommander (IC) by allowing a LLM to play this role within a wildfire situation. The IC will follow operationalguidelines and guide the agents’ behaviour in order to provide them with more degrees of freedom and removethe constraints associated with traditional behaviour trees. This approach not only aids in simulating realisticoperational scenarios but also generates valuable insights for Aircraft Conceptual Design (ACD), enabling thederivation of specific design requirements based on simulation outcomes.

Wildfires are extremely difficult to manage and control. If they grow out of control, they are capable of destroying countless resources and entire populations. Over the years, resources and tactics have been focused on improving reactive capabilities. However, adopting a proactive approach can reduce reaction time and the necessary resources when action is needed for suppressing a fire. Both the proactive and reactive phases of wildfire management involve numerous systems that need to communicate and collaborate. When a collection of systems is working together towards a goal, it is beneficial to see them as a System of Systems. This thesis takes a System of Systems approach to wildfire management and examines modelling and simulation considerations, with special interest in methods that can be used to obtain a refined set of system requirements. More specifically, aircraft requirements for the concept generation of firefighting aerial vehicles. Additionally, the thesis considers stakeholders’ needs and the consequent viewpoints reflecting their interests and concerns, which are necessary for developing high-level operational concepts. These topics are often overlooked, yet necessary to keep communities engaged and to develop measures of effectiveness and performance that capture the value of different System of Systems combinations. All these considerations are intended to contribute to the improvement of holistic requirement generation for product development. 

The increasing interest in System-of-Systems (SoS) for engineering applications are introducing new challenges that must be overcome at an early design stage. One of these is the integration of different tools that can be used to make predictions about a system under development and how these together can be used to predict SoS performances by comparison of parameter spaces.The purpose of this paper is therefore to illustrate how different SoS architectures can be modeled, simulated, and evaluated throughout different scenarios by different teams of researchers following a common workflow.An ontology is used as an overarching knowledge base where information about entities, such as scenario details, can be extracted and used for the setup of Agentbased Simulations(ABS) through a tool integration software acting as master that controls the correct execution of the defined workflow.The tool integration software also enables additional modelling capabilities, such as a Design of Experiments (DOE) definition for design space explorations, an Optimizer with different algorithms, user-defined Python scripts, etc. 

The System of Systems (SoS) framework plays a pivotal role in delimiting aircraft design spaces by examininginteractions among its Constituent Systems (CS). Each CS has a distinct collection of capabilities, some of which may be shared with other CS. The framework explores emergent behaviours that arise from communication between the CS within the SoS. These emergent behaviours are characterized by their unattainability by any individual CS and result from their collaborative nature. The identification of these emergent behaviours enablesSystem of Systems Engineering (SoSE) to pinpoint the most valuable configurations of the SoS, thereby maximizing the collective value. Furthermore, these emergent behaviours aid in stipulating design requirements for new systems based on the capabilities outlined in the SoS study. To map the relationship between needs, capabilities, requirements, and behaviours, maintaining traceability throughout the study is paramount. This research employs workflows created using the Remote Component Environment (RCE), a specialized tool for structured and automated task development. The objective is to showcase RCE's integration capabilitiesspecifically for software tools and Python scripts- with task scheduling. This integration enables swift extraction of results, making them available at every step, thus augmenting analysis efficiency. The study focuses on the perspective of an aircraft designer during the early concept generation phase, specifically applied to the development of an electric Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) concept for wildfire detection. 

In the field of System-of-Systems (SoS) engineering, the study of interactions between complex systems froma holistic point of view is important for finding emerging behaviours. To observe as many behaviours aspossible, especially when field testing is not a viable option, simulations play an important role in design spaceexploration and formulation for the Firefighting SoS framework. The presented work describes an AgentBased Model (ABM) approach for simulation of wildfire spread and its detection using collaborating vehicles:Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or partly autonomous air- and land-based vehicles. Implemented in theopen-source software NetLogo, the usage of its Geographic Information System (GIS) extension allows tosimulate scenarios at specific locations. This ABM will be used in the future for Agent-Based Simulations(ABS) for the study of an SoS framework oriented to firefighting, including design and optimization of the SoS,constituent systems and their subsystems.