Dynamic Planning of System of Systems Architecture Evolution

The dynamic planning and development of a large collection of systems or a ‘System of Systems’ (SoS) pose significant programmatic challenges due to the complex interactions that exist between its constituent systems. Decisions to add, remove, or reconstitute connections between systems can result in repercussive failures across operational and developmental dimensions of an SoS. The work conducted in this research is part of a larger body of work funded by the DoD Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) towards the development of an Analytic Workbench. This paper in particular develops a tool that adopts an operations research-based perspective to SoS level planning based on metrics of cost, performance, schedule and risk. Specifically, our work employs an Approximate Dynamic Programming approach that is well suited to address issues of computational tractability of the resulting dynamic planning optimization problem. This approach allows for identification of near-optimal multi-stage decisions in evolving SoS architectures. A Naval Warfare Scenario SoS example problem illustrates application of the method.