Technical Report
System Maturity and Architecture Assessment Methods, Processes, and Tools

Report Number: SERC-2012-TR-027-1
Publication Date: 2012-03-02
Project:
System Readiness Level, System Maturity And Architecture Assessment
Principal Investigators:
Dr. Brian Sauser
Co-Principal Investigators:
At present, the System Readiness Level (SRL), as developed by the Systems
Development & Maturity Laboratory (SysDML) at Stevens Institute of Technology, is a
descriptive model that characterizes the effects of technology and integration maturity
on a system engineering effort a systems development program. One of the current
deficiencies in system maturity assessments (measure of readiness) is that it is
performed independent of any systems engineering tools or supporting artifacts, which
could reduce the level of subjectivity in an assessment and reliability in the results. The
advent of system engineering modeling tools has enabled system architects to better
understand a system by depicting various views of the system and its components. For
this purpose, architectural frameworks have been introduced for various domains and
industries to support a common language and set of tools for developing a system. One
of the widely adopted frameworks in the defense sector of the United States is the
Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF). In addition, Department of
Defense (DoD) subcontractors have adopted DoDAF as part of their systems
engineering process, and industry consortia are currently working on adopting the
DoDAF vocabulary and products to complement their standardized approaches to
systems and software development. With the current challenges in systems maturity
assessment and the advancement of systems engineering architecture tools, this
research has attempted to:
Identify the systems engineering architectural artifacts that support the
assessment of a technology maturity (via Technology Readiness Levels),
integration maturity (via Integration Readiness Levels), and likewise system
maturity (via System Readiness Levels);
Correlate systems engineering architectural artifacts to supported views and
artifacts within the DoDAF that enable TRL and IRL assessment; and
Develop a maturity assessment tool that works with standard industry SE
architecture tools (e.g. Sparx Enterprise Architect, IBM Rhapsody).