Publication

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).