Model-Based Evaluation of the System of Systems Architectures Used to Perform Trade Studies and Sensitivity Analyses

Abstract

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.