Integration of Risk Analysis into Acquisition Cost, Schedule, and Performance Evaluation Tools

A critical capability required by the DoD is maintaining an accurate and comprehensive picture of the battlespace at all times. A key to this is the growing use of layered sensor networks that together form complex systems-of-systems. Utilizing this approach for effective situational awareness requires high level of trust in the data that is ultimately produced. Critical to this goal is ensuring the trustworthiness of the components that ultimately compose the system-of-systems. In addition, the measure of trustworthiness may be different between missions. To overcome these obstacles, the Air Force is taking a focused, architecture-based approach to systems engineering. They require new tools to capture and analyze systems-of-systems architectures in an unambiguous and mathematical way. This provides the basis to assess risk and measure trust at the architectural level. The proposed RAISE/T Phase II solution builds on previous EDAptive Computing, Inc (ECI) knowledge and technology – itself innovative – to evaluate trustworthiness and its impact on risk within a system-of-systems architecture through modeling and simulation. The resulting capabilities will provide a flexible framework for architecting trust into distributed, heterogeneous sensor networks. Ultimately, the Air Force will be able to deliver new solution to the warfighter with greater confidence and significantly reduced risk. BENEFIT: The ability to accurately architect complex systems that are safe and reliable is a fundamental and unmet need in nearly every DoD acquisition program. The RAISE/T tool is applicable to any mission-critical complex system where trustworthiness is important. Our graphical system modeling framework provides a valuable foundation for analyzing the system at varying degrees of granularity, allowing both an abstract view of the system-of-systems and detailed views of individual components and their behaviors. The result is a system-of-systems architecture which performs as expected and provides high level of trust. The future warfare model increasingly depends upon employment of net-centric, distributed technology. Model-based, architectural engineering is a key to success. Not only does our solution address the needs of the Air Force, but it will provide a significant foundation for improving trustworthiness of distributed, mission-critical system architectures across today’s military and aerospace markets. As a result, RAISE/T will be beneficial to the DoD, Homeland Security, NASA, NSA and other agencies with common requirements. Importantly, our proposed solution can be transitioned effectively to the commercial sector by providing a more cost effective method to improve the trust of system-of-systems technology development in a variety of market sectors such as healthcare, commercial aviation and communications where privacy, financial or security concerns make trustworthiness in mission-critical systems very important.