Trade-offs in system of systems acquisition

• Main Author: Burton, Frank R.
• Other Authors: Paige, Richard F. ; Poulding, Simon ; Whittington, Dick ; Smith, Simon
• Published: University of York 2014
• Subjects: 004
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.634365

Large organisations tend to have multiple organisational goals. Example goals for organisations that perform search and rescue might be being able to search large areas quickly, and to provide, for the speedy recovery of survivors. To satisfy these goals, organisations will acquire different resources such as new systems, training programmes, infrastructure and processes. These different resources when combined to meet the same organisational goals, can be considered as a System of Systems (SoS). Organisational goals can be satisfied by completely different resource combinations with each resource combination satisfying the individual goals to varying degrees and with different overall costs. Since organisations only have limited resources available to them, there is an incentive for organisations to find the most efficient resource combinations to satisfy their goals. This can be considered as performing trade-offs in SoS acquisition. There are several open research gaps in performing trade-offs in SoS acquisition. The first is that the resources involved are heterogeneous. How do you compare the benefits of new equipment against new training programmes or organisational structures? The second is the multi-objective nature of the problem with the different organisational goals competing for the same limited budget. The third is managing the problem through-life and maintaining the satisfaction of organisational goals as old system retire and new systems come into service. This thesis presents a model-based technique (with prototype tool support) that combines techniques from the fields of through life capability management, goal modelling, search-based software engineering and model-driven engineering. This technique addresses the three problems stated above allowing decision makers to more efficiently consider the trade-offs involved when performing SoS acquisition. The technique has been evaluated on a realistic case study and on a standard problem found in the field of search-based software engineering.