Publication

All systems and system of systems (SoS) have an architecture – either explicit or implicit. The architecture of the system impacts many downstream design decisions, and the longer lifecycle issues that impact the cost of system maintenance, security, and integration with other systems. As systems become more interconnected into system of systems, they must operate in a network centric environment. These networks may be a collection of disparate networks, wireless networks, networks of people, and some unknown future form of connectivity. This is such a daunting concern that industry competitors have created the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) for the purpose of working together to improve the probability that individually architected systems from different companies will interoperate with one another. One of the many challenges in this environment is to predict system performance as the system(s) architecture is being designed, and then to validate that performance when the system is prototyped and later instantiated. The good viable approach to this is through model-based systems architecting.