Early Quality Evaluation of System of Systems Architecture Within Trade Study Process

In this age of innovation, the application of model-based system engineering is key for solving complex problems. Complexity issues are particularly prevalent when there are several systems that must communicate independently. From a system engineering point of view, this is recognized as a system of systems level. At this level, the major concern is the architecture assessment that is usually performed by trade study analysis. However, a trade study is a time-consuming and expensive activity. In consideration of these obstacles, we propose a new trade study process (Bankauskaite and Morkevicius, 2020) for the system of systems architecture developed in Unified Architecture Framework models. This process is designed to support automated methods that allow for greater transparency, better uncertainty analysis, and increased flexibility in adapting to scope changes. One of the crucial stages of the trade study process is the initial assessment of alternative architectures, called the Base Check. The purpose of this stage is to narrow the set of solutions to select only plausible alternatives that are of sufficient quality and can be further evaluated. This paper presents the key rules applicable to initial architecture assessment, together with automated methods. Provided rules are verified by running an experiment on real-world models to confirm their eligibility.