Publication

The development of a System-of-Systems (SoS) remains a highly challenging endeavor due to the complex interdependencies between systems that often exhibit managerial and operational independence, yet, must work cohesively to achieve an overarching set of capabilities. Current guidelines set forth by the Department of Defense SoS System Engineering guide present SoS SE as a set of seven core elements which are connected to the 16 technical and management processes in the Defense Acquisition Guidebook (DAG). This guide, however, as well subsequent frameworks (such as the Wave Model), are primarily meant to raise awareness of the key issues and products involved. A need exists to create and mature decision support tools to support the decision making process of evolving SoS architectures; including the need for properly assessing the impact that potential disruptions can have, and the analysis of alternatives SoS constructs.

Trades between facets of capability and various measures of risk are essential decisions that must be addressed for SoS capability planning. Existing tools for such trades, where they exist, can be ineffective and non-intuitive when size and/or interdependency complexity is high. These features create a tradeoff space between development risk and capability potential of a system. Prior work under RT-36 centered on seven analytical methods that have been adapted to support SoS architecting decisions and systems engineering of constituent systems. Since no single method or tool can fulfill all technical and managerial needs, the exploration of methods in this report use generic forms of problems faced by practitioners, focusing on inputs, outputs, and limitations in the context of support for the “Wave” model for SoS architectural evolutions.

Work under this RT-44b initiative builds upon our earlier efforts in RT-36 and extends the theoretical and practical underpinnings of a suite of methods used to support decision-making in evolving SoS architectures. It is one of three projects active under SERC’s Enterprise as Systems and System of Systems (ESoS) SERC thrust area. The research shows promise in evolving towards a real-world deployable toolset that is applicable across multiple SoS domains. The goal is to provide a set of tools and methods within an Analytic Workbench setting that reduces the complexities of decision-making in SoS environments that typically overwhelm the immediate mental faculties of the SoS practitioner. The work in this report demonstrates key concepts and value-added through application of the methods to a collection of SoS pertinent scenarios to illustrate this strength.