Engineering Experience‐Driven, Solution‐Dependent Logistics Support Stakeholder Requirements for new Members in a Federation of Systems

Abstract

Federations of systems are ubiquitous. Many organizations use families of systems of similar nature, which do not have any interaction with each other, but that are somehow related in purpose or functionality and are used collectively. Such a family is known as a federation of systems (FoS). Federations of systems show an inflow and outflow of members and allow users to gather substantial experience. This permits a special approach to the engineering of requirements for new members, which are to join an FoS. Stakeholder requirements are to be solution‐independent. Yet, an FoS presents an outstanding possibility to users for benefiting from the gathered experience and from the existing logistics support resources of the members of the family, to state the requirements for new members of the family such that the overall logistics support structure of the FoS and its associated costs are minimized. This paper shows the logistics support elements for which requirements can be written, based on gathered experience. Numerous cases are mentioned in which such approach lead to a significant improvement of the overall cost/effectiveness ratio, optimizing the effectiveness of the use of the logistics support resources, while minimizing associated costs, logistics footprint and response time.