7 th Annual Conference on Systems Engineering Research 2009 (CSER 2009) Demonstration of System of Systems Multi-Attribute Tradespace Exploration on a Multi-Concept Surveillance Architecture Debarati Chattopadhyay 1 and Adam M. Ross 2 and Donna H. Rhodes 3 1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, debarati@mit.edu 2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, adamross@mit.edu 3 Massachusetts Institute of Technology,USA, rhodes@mit.edu Abstract One of the primary challenges for decision makers during concept exploration in engineering system design is selecting designs that are valuable throughout the operational lifetime of the system. The problem is even more difficult when designing Systems of Systems (SoS), which are dynamic, complex, higher-order systems that may be composed of both legacy and new component systems. There are several heuristics and qualitative guidelines for designing SoS in the literature, but there is a lack of practical quantitative methods for SoS concept exploration. Development of quantitative methods for SoS conceptual design will greatly improve the ability of decision makers to select SoS designs that will be value robust over time. These quantitative methods will allow decision makers to consider a larger and more complete set of alternative SoS designs than is possible with qualitative methods alone. A SoS tradespace exploration method is being developed by augmenting the existing Dynamic Multi-Attribute Tradespace Exploration method with SoS-specific considerations, such as the existence of a multi-level stakeholder value function, the incorporation of both legacy and new component systems, and the potential time-varying composition of the SoS. In this paper, a case study of an operationally responsive multi-concept surveillance system for disaster relief is used to illustrate this developing SoS tradespace exploration method. This case study was partially completed as a collaborative project between MIT and the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, and later extended by MIT. Several surveillance concepts - satellite, aircraft, unmanned air vehicle, and sensor swarms - were considered as possible concept solutions to achieve the surveillance mission objectives. The above system concepts are compared on the same tradespace, demonstrating the ability of the proposed method to allow decision makers to quantitatively compare disparate single system concepts on a common performance and cost basis. Following analysis of the different single system concepts, multi-concept SoS designs composed of heterogeneous components were modeled and then compared with the single system concepts on a common tradespace. This disaster surveillance system case study demonstrates the ability of the SoS tradespace exploration method to enable the quantitative comparison of the relative performance of alternative SoS designs, and thereby contributes to an improved SoS concept design and selection method. Keywords: Systems of Systems, tradespace exploration, conceptual design, disaster management 1 Introduction While there are many different definitions and descriptions of Systems of Systems (SoS) suggested in the literature, there is no generally agreed upon definition of SoS. A broad descrip- tion of SoS is that they are higher order, dynamic systems composed of other independently managed systems. A common element of all of the literature descriptions is that SoS are systems, and as such have all of the system engineer- ing requirements of traditional systems. However, there are additional considerations that make SoS design more com- plex than traditional systems. Due to the managerial and op- erational independence of component systems within an SoS [1], there are both local component system stakeholders and global SoS stakeholders that must be considered during SoS design. As a result of this independence, components may also join or leave the SoS over time, leading to a dynamic SoS composition over the system lifetime. The incorpora- tion of both legacy and new components, and the different levels of control that the SoS designer has over the design and participation of each type of component, introduces ad- ditional complexity into the design process. Due to these SoS-specific issues, the critical task in system conceptual de- sign, that of selecting design options that will maintain value throughout the system lifetime, is more complex in the case of SoS than in traditional systems. The added complexity of the aforementioned SoS traits requires new SoS conceptual design methods that utilize and build upon traditional con- ceptual design tools in order to aid decision makers during this early phase of design. Quantitative conceptual design methods such as tradespace exploration are often used in design for traditional systems to enable the comparison of a large number of designs and the identification of the tradeoffs between system attributes and stakeholder preferences. However, the SoS literature primar- ily focuses on heuristics for conceptual design which only allows the comparison of a small number of designs on a very qualitative basis [1, 2]. There is a need for quantitative conceptual design methods for SoS that allow for the com- parison of multi-concept disparate SoS designs along with single concept systems on the same performance and cost basis, enabling the designer to explore the full concept de- sign space available. In order to develop such a quantita- tive method for SoS, the approach in this research, as intro- duced in [3], has been to extend an existing tradespace explo- ration method called Multi-Attribute Tradespace Exploration (MATE) through the incorporation of SoS-specific consider- ations. The first step in developing a method that allows the com- Copyright c 2009 by D. Chattopadhyay, A.M. Ross, and D.H. Rhodes Loughborough University - 20 th – 23 rd April 2009