Leveraging tradeoff, bridging the gap among disciplines

Abstract

AbstractThe systems analysis process builds on decisions rooted in results from quantitative tradeoff studies. A consensus on its activities is widely shared and documented by norms and handbooks: ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288:2015, INCOSE Systems engineering handbook.2015 and NASA handbook.2007. Nonetheless, the development of methodologies supporting traceability between the systems analysis process and the other systems engineering processes is still an open area of research, especially within the framework of model‐based approaches. As a result, documents justifying architecture choices are still produced by consolidating data manually; and what is more, data evolution is also verified manually. Such time‐consuming tasks have no real added value but are potential sources of error. Tooling the capitalization of the tradeoff data—including the rationales based on parameter values and their evolutions from project milestone to project milestone—would significantly facilitate the production and integrity of the documentation of architecture justification. This article reports on the results of our research in this direction.