Functional Allocation Trades Between Hardware and Software

Design is the act of generating information that is used to make decisions or produce a product. Modern products are moving away from segregated disjointed systems and towards interdependent systems that utilize shared hardware and software resources (e.g. zonal power distribution, ethernet based controls, shared racks and mounts to facilitate advanced outfitting, etc.). Determining the appropriate balance between hardware and software configurations is an integral part of the design process. Modern design methods and tools still create and analyze designs as a set of disjointed systems, or in most cases, segregated analysis operations are organized by traditional technical domains. The concept of"shared resource"must become part of an integrated design process that considers allocation trade-off between hardware and software capabilities. Developing a software tool for balancing decisions when allocating investments in hardware and software during the development of complex DoD systems will have an impact on the lifecycle cost, the reliability, the robustness, and the utility of a new Defense system. Such a software tool will have the ability to select in an automated top-down approach the hardware/software configuration which will maximize the utility of the system through probabilistic analysis given a set of targeted performance characteristics. It will also be possible to use the new software in a manual bottom-up approach in order to assess the utility of a particular selection of hardware/software configuration made by the user. In either mode of operation, information will be presented in a graphical format for easy interpretation of the impacts that the selections have to the performance of the system. Such a research effort will be pursued by Michigan Engineering Services, LLC (MES) under the proposed SBIR program for developing a Decision Support toolkit for Hardware/Software allocation studies (DS toolkit for H/S).