Decision aide for affordability risk identification, management, and optimization of tactical missile manufacturing

Army Science and Technology (S&T) managers need a decision aide to identify and manage manufacturing affordability risks to lower costs and increase the transition success rate to tactical missile systems. This program leverages an existing web-based, secure, and modular costing framework that is being developed for strategic missile programs with involvement from leading contractors. The innovations of the proposed research are to enhance this framework with capabilities needed by Army tactical missile S&T managers such as: user interfaces and workflows tailored for ease of use on their specific tasks; and a database of historical tactical missile cost elements with common issues in their manufacturing, integration, assembly and test. Another innovation is to leverage an emerging systems engineering data model standard to enable cost, schedule constraint and performance parameter trade space analysis; and to support established risk assessment and management techniques that can be applied to Manufacturing/Technology Readiness Levels and Assessments. The path to commercialization will be for use on S&T programs, initially for tactical missile programs such as NLOS and EAPS by the Army and contractors, then later expanding to cruise missile, aviation and other military programs.