The major driver for the Model-based systems engineering adoption in industry is the ability for an engineer to develop systems with traceability to requirements, using one integrated architecture model that enables all types of automated analysis, e.g. impact analysis, gap analysis, trade studies, and simulations. Today, complex real-life problems require the application of MBSE practices, where evolving systems communicate independently, both operationally and managerially, to achieve a common goal. This is the level of system of systems. At this level the major concern is an architecture assessment and trade study analysis, which can lead to different criteria and techniques for identification and comparison of alternatives to keep architecture in line with budgets and timelines. Although there are multiple process that provide step-by-step descriptions of trade study analyses, there are none that detail how trade study analyses could be automated in the model-based environment in combination with existing architecture frameworks, languages, and tools. The goal of this research is to propose an automated trade study analysis process for the System of systems architecture developed in the Unified Architecture Framework models. It is a part of the larger research of trade study analysis automation, including modeling guidance, model quality checks, and automation scripts. Architecture frameworks continue to evolve. In September of 2013, a Request for Proposal for Unified Profile for DoDAF and MODAF (UPDM 3.0) (later renamed Unified Architecture Framework (UAF)) was created (OMG, 2013). Since the issue of the request for proposal (RFP), the UAF 1.0 working group identified the list of requirements, including Architecture Modeling Support for Defense, Industry, and Government Organizations, support of Security Domain, Human Systems Integration, and Support of Systems of Systems (SoS) Life Cycle Processes and Analyses. In the past four years, a brand new UAF 1.0 became the official Object Management Group (OMG) standard and is about to become the ISO/IEC 19517 standard (Hause et al., 2016). Unified Architecture Framework became a standard-based tool to capture SoS information in a digital environment and with graphical models. However, UAF is neither a methodology nor a method. This opens up discussions, such as how to utilize UAF to get the best possible gain. It all depends on the purpose of UAF application, the industry, and the use case, even though there is one communality between all the applications of UAF, which is the essence of the Model-based Systems Engineering. UAF has been designed to support trade studies at different levels: trade-off operational scenarios against capability requirements or trade-off resources against operational needs (OMG, 2017b). The mechanism to capture required data is provided; however, the process of doing that is missing. Numerous processes are available to describe trade-off analysis step by step. We analyze some of the approaches in the following section of this paper. The...
Trade studies have become an indispensable engineering activity and are used often in the early stage of system architecture development. Trade studies not only help when choosing the most balanced alternative, but are also essential in highlighting the most influential aspects of the system. Trade studies in highly sophisticated systems are often very complex. Therefore, given these complexities, we proposed a new trade study process for the system of systems architecture developed in Unified Architecture Framework models. This process supports automated methods that allow for greater accuracy, better uncertainty analysis, and accelerated analysis of alternatives. One of the essential and challenging stages of the proposed trade study process is a thorough evaluation of plausible alternatives, referred to as the Deep Check. The goal of this stage is to identify the most balanced alternative by evaluating those that are plausible against established evaluation criteria. This paper introduces a new approach to evaluate the system of systems architectures within a trade study process using automated methods in a model-based system engineering environment. We verified the proposed method by running an experiment on a real-world model to confirm its eligibility.INDEX TERMS Architecture evaluation, sensitivity analysis, system of systems architecture, trade study, unified architecture framework (UAF).
In this complex world, where evolving systems communicate independently to achieve a common goal, the ability for an engineer to develop systems with traceability to requirements, using one integrated architecture model that enables all types of automated analysis (e.g., impact analysis, gap analysis, trade study analysis, and simulation) is becoming more and more vital. Today, the core enabler for automated analysis is the application of model‐based systems engineering practices. Model‐based systems engineering is used to capture system or systems of systems architecture as descriptive and analytical system models, which relate text‐based requirements to the architecture and provide an infrastructure to support trade study analysis. One of the core techniques to perform such analysis is requirements verification. This paper proposes an approach for an automated trade study analysis based on dynamic requirements verification in the model‐based systems engineering environment, with a goal to support trade of analysis both in the system of systems and systems engineering domains.
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