Functional Allocation Trades Between Hardware and Software

Design, analysis, and assessment of multiple alternatives is important to ensuring the development and fielding of DoD systems that face increasingly dynamic and rapid changes in missions. New methods and tools are needed that compensate and recover from disruptions, adapt to dynamic environments, and rapidly deliver new solutions. A key goal is ensuring that engineering programs maximize utility and represent best value for the investment across a breadth of potential missions in joint operational environments. In this Phase I SBIR, we will develop a software tool with an approach for allocating system functions to implementations of hardware or software. The design studies will be evaluated with quantitative assessment techniques to determine the strengths and weaknesses of each allocation options. This will be provided in a context that supports multiple abstraction layers and decomposition views from a hierarchically increasing view (e.g. component, subsystem, system, and system-of-systems). The software tool uses a design study method that enables comparative assessments to be made between allocations of the same function to hardware and software implementations. The results will be summarized in a dashboard display to the decision maker with graphical visualizations supported by quantitative assessments of factors evaluations.