A morphological approach to reviewing the literature on evaluation and selection of Commercial-Off-The- Shelf equipment for Defense

Abstract

To reduce the time and costs associated with the lifecycle of military equipment for continued operational effectiveness, Departments of Defense purchase Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) products. In this way, design and development costs are passed on to the manufacturer. At the same time, it is possible to take advantage of the rapid pace of technological advances in the industry. However, due to the nature of Defense equipment, COTS must be carefully evaluated and selected to mitigate the risks associated with entering government stockpile products that do not perform as intended or fail prematurely throughout their lifecycle. The present study develops an analytical framework to consolidate the prevailing research on COTS selection and evaluation for Defense use, identifies gaps, and proposes future research. We adopted a morphological analysis approach to systematically review the identified studies. We create a morphological structure with five dimensions specified by the Input-Process-Outcome (IPO) approach; it functions as a repository of the literature and allows the researcher to make changes as the literature portfolio grows, given its flexible representation and modularity.