Modeling the Impact of Technology Transition on Ship Operational Capabilities

The development and maintenance of large, complex systems and systems of systems such as the DDX or Aegis systems requires a monumental degree of planning and organization in order to complete even the seemingly most simple tasks. To make matters even more challenging, the DDX system is engaged in a Spiral Development and Technology Insertion paradigm in which systems are developed, and then inserted into the larger system, evaluated, improved and then reinserted as the system matures. In such an environment decisions must be made at each step to ensure that the system will perform as expected, when expected, and meet its budgetary requirements. New technologies must meet performance requirements that may be dependent on other applications and new technologies. This implies that some technologies must be inserted prior to others because of some dependency on previously inserted models. Finally, the technology must meet the budgetary constraints set forth. When new technology is considered for insertion into the larger system, there are a number of factors that need to be evaluated to ensure the technology meets the requirements described above. Some of these factors are the maturity of the technology, the estimated performance of the technology in the larger environment, its reliability, maintainability, and its sustainability. Other factors involve the many kids of cost of a system; its development cost, life-cycle cost, and its cost to maintain. Another factor involved is the impact the insertion itself will have on the system the technology is being inserted into. Trident Systems proposes to develop a suite of software tools designed to provide these capabilities. This Technology Insertion Planning Capability (TIPC) should provide the Navy with a significant set of tools for evaluating the impact of changes during the Spiral Development Process. These tools would make use of the latest graph technology to create dependency graphs of the technologies that are being modeled. Rules and algorithms would be developed that provide a coherent structure in the area of technology insertion. These algorithms will allow the software to be structured in such a way as to provide the necessary automation to construct technology insertion schedules based on the dependence of the technologies on other parts of the graph, as well as to optimize the schedule based on criteria such as the cost of the insertion, or the performance increase that would be realized. The primary feature of the system would be an engine that evaluates the technology entities based on the concept of dependency. A model of a system can be created that has, as entities, the technological elements currently under development. The model will consist of a graph that contains the technologies as nodes, and the dependencies as edges in the graph. This model would represent a level of abstraction above that of the system state model or the implementation.