A Pragmatic Method for Assessing Systems Architectures During the Architecture Generation Process with a Focus on Repurposing Business Software to Systems Engineering

Modern engineering systems are large-scale and complex by their nature. The complexity leads to significant commitments of resources early in the life-cycle, before all foundational decisions have been made. The architecting process allows many design concepts to be created and evaluated early in the life-cycle. The most satisfactory architectures are then qualified for development. There is a lack of inexpensive tools readily available to apply towards systems architecting evaluation. This paper sets forth a cost effective and efficient method to assess architectural design and its ability to meet the needs set forth by stakeholders. The method utilizes common office applications and universal engineering problem solving techniques to calculate quantitative scores to select the optimal architecture. Multiple architectures were evaluated and the model was able to ascertain the most suitable architecture against the reference criteria. Through the use of Kiviat charts and algebraic manipulation a quantitative method for evaluating systems architectures can be easily implemented using Microsoft Excel. A benefit of this method is cost savings found in utilizing common software to address systems architecture. This method is well suited to systems engineering, especially in smaller scale start-up and niche engineering companies.