System of Systems Quality Attribute Balancing

An objective of System-of-Systems (SoS) engineering work in the Defense community is to ensure optimal delivery of operational capabilities to warfighters in the face of finite resources and constantly changing conditions. This paper builds and extends previous SoS engineering work in the Department of Defense (DoD) to develop a process framework that can improve the analysis of architectural attributes within an enterprise. We quantify certain system attributes of interest using selected Quality Attributes. The proposed framework provides an approach to achieve an SoS balance of design for performance and quality attribute optimization while employing a capability model to provide a comparison of available alternatives against overarching preferences. We illustrate the framework using a DoD Satellite Communications (SATCOM) case study. Specifically, we consider the question of whether a certain Quality Attribute-resilience-can best be achieved through design alternatives of satellite disaggregation or diversification. The analysis shows that based on the metric mapping and design alternatives examined, diversification provides the greatest SATCOM capability improvement compared to the base architecture, while also enhancing resilience. Although our focus here is on SATCOM, the framework can be extended to address multiple similar issues with system characteristics and SoS architecture questions for a wide range of enterprises.