Evaluating the System of Systems Requirements Allocation Process

Abstract

The importance of a sound Requirements Engineering (RE) process to influence a system’s success or failure cannot be understated. The activities include the elicitation, analysis, modeling, verification / validation, and management of requirements to fully document a capability envisioned by the stakeholder to be constructed and implemented. With the introduction of the System of Systems (SoS) concept, multiple independent program offices are needed to both develop their system roadmaps as well as manage additional capability requirements to enable an emergent and unique capability if all parts of the SoS interoperate together. The challenge is how to allocate SoS requirements to the individual systems to ensure that the capabilities are being achieved without excessive redundancy or omissions in the new requirements. There has been research in the fields of requirements engineering that are typically limited to single systems, lessening the need for allocation concerns. Research in the field of SoS is focused mainly on performance once the configuration is established, or how to manage the SoS once the requirements have already been developed. Little attention has been paid to the issues of collaboration between the stakeholders to determine the initial allocation of the SoS requirements, and ensure that this allocation will properly satisfy the intended objectives. The objective of this research is to develop a SoS RE process to address the initial formation of SoS requirements that may be typically found at the beginning of the systems engineering lifecycle. The proposed process will develop models in order to transform SoS concepts into SoS requirements, and then allocate them to individual systems. Metrics are developed to address how much a particular system may be under/over-tasked to achieve the SoS requirements. A key issue to be addressed in this proposal is to identify when a proposed SoS concept has its requirements improperly allocated to the available configuration, and thus risks failure to achieve the desired capability. The methodology is illustrated through two case studies that highlight the processes and comparisons of SoS configurations to assess the requirements capacity allocation.