Performance modeling of a surveillance mission

When you have to select the number of aircraft to realize a mission, not being confident in your performance could be expensive and hazardous. By using performance modeling and Monte Carlo simulation, you can define the performance's distribution for the option you may choose or find the optimal solution. This paper details the way to obtain such a result and the added value the method has from an operational and financial point of view compared to a traditional method based on spreadsheet calculations. A key conclusion of this analysis is that the performance level of the mission depends on the number of operators available to use the system. This is important in the sense that the customer often provides the operators, and their number is fixed. Therefore your maximum performance is defined by this number and not by the number of systems you can exploit. Therefore, even if your system is highly reliable and resilient, it will be impossible to achieve a high level of availability without the right concept of operations and concept of maintenance in place. Furthermore these aspects must be thought about from the first stages of the project in a systems approach as they will determine your performance and your financial performance for a service level agreement (SLA) based contract. This study also demonstrates that the current performance modeling software and languages are sufficient to obtain the statistical distribution of the performance of the system from the initial concept and that could allow companies to optimize their offer and to be aware of the risk that they take. Moreover, the use of tools based on spreadsheet can't be used for this kind of simulation as they don't allow you to model share resources, time dependent phenomenon, conditional logic.