System Capability Satisficing in Defense Acquisition via Component Importance Measures

Abstract

With support from the Naval Postgraduate School and government/industry partnerships, the Systems Development & Maturity Laboratory (SD&ML) at Stevens Institute of Technology has successfully developed a systems maturity measure (i.e., System Readiness Level [SRL]) and supporting optimization models for inclusion in a Systems Earned Readiness Management methodology. We now believe it is time to spiral back to the beginning of the original developments of the SRL to enhance fundamental capabilities of assessing system maturity in order to address some recurring issues to its application. That is, systems have variants in their physical architecture that realize certain functionality and capability by which trade-off decisions are made to find a satisficing solution for a deployable system. This paper enhances previously developed methodologies by addressing this fundamental question, What are the trades-off in functionality, capability, cost, schedule, and maturity that will allow the deployment of a less-than-fully mature system that can still satisfy specific needs of the warfighter? To answer this question, we formulate a capability-specific SRL and use multi-dimensional component importance analysis to identify which components of the system should receive the most application of resources when they are constrained.