System-of-Systems Cost Estimation: Analysis of Lead System Integrator Engineering Activities

Cososimo Context

We are seeing a growing trend in industry and the government agencies to “quickly” incorporate new technologies and expand the capabilities of legacy systems by integrating them with other legacy systems, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products, and new systems into a system of systems, generally with the intent to share information from related systems and to create new, emergent capabilities that are not possible with the existing stove-piped systems. With this development approach, we see new activities being performed to define the new architecture, identify sources to either supply or develop the required components, and then to integrate and test these high level components. Along with this “system-of-systems” development approach, we have seen a new role in the development process evolve to perform these activities: that of the LSI. A recent Air Force study (United States Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, 2005) clearly states that the SoS Engineering (SoSE) effort and focus related to LSI activities is considerably different from the more traditional system development projects. According to this report, key areas where LSI activities are more complex or different than traditional systems engineering are the system architecting, especially in the areas of system interoperability and system “ilities;” acquisition and management; and anticipation of needs.

Key to developing a cost model such as COSOSIMO is understanding what a “system-of-systems” is. Early literature research (Jamshidi, 2005) showed that the term “system-of-systems” can mean many things across different organizations. For the purposes of the COSOSIMO cost model development, the research team has focused on the SoS definitions provided in Maier (1999) and Sage and Cuppan (2001): an evolutionary net-centric architecture that allows geographically distributed component systems to exchange information and perform tasks within the framework that they are not capable of performing on their own outside of the framework. This is often referred to as “emergent behaviors.” Key issues in developing an SoS are the security of information shared between the various component systems, how to get the right information to the right destinations efficiently without overwhelming users with unnecessary or obsolete information, and how to maintain dynamic networks so that component system “nodes” can enter and leave the SoS.