Tooling to Understand Ripple Effect Costs (TUREC)

When upgrading or redesigning a complex system, it is crucial to under- stand the impact of design changes on the system’s resulting costs, especially costs related to re-certification. System-level requirements cut across several components and subsystems, includ- ing size, weight, and power budgets; bandwidth and processor utilization; timing constraints; safety requirements; and security controls. Small, local changes to a subsystem or component can have broad impacts on system requirements. The proposed Tooling to Understand Ripple Effect Costs (TUREC) project will make Adventium’s existing Model-Based System Engineering (MBSE) tools change-aware, enabling a change impact cost estimation from each tool’s point-of-view. The cost measurements are then rolled up into a trade space explorer that enumerates and visualizes to the developer at the system level the impact their changes have on overall costs. In addition, the developer will define how change impact is weighted within the individual analysis tools and at the system level using a customizable Change Impact Function (CIF). The CIF provides the developer a means to drive their system designs to a solution that encompasses the full impact of their system changes, including changes that may propagate through the system.