System-of-Systems Acquisition: Alignment and Collaboration

Abstract

System-of-systems (SoS) acquisition research has identified lack of alignment and lack of collaboration as two important issues leading to problems in SoS acquisition. This paper captures the exploratory work toward improving alignment between and collaboration among the individual system programs in the development of a SoS. A collaborative web-based system is proposed, on which personnel of all programs associated with a SoS can input and retrieve information required to align the individual programs. The overall development of the SoS and component systems is treated as a critical-path network and the need points for component system inputs are identified as intermediate milestones requiring SoS-component system collaboration. An attraction mechanism to effect SoS inter-program collaboration is incorporated in a model capturing this web-based SoS collaborative system. Simulation using this model then provides results to establish the feasibility of such a SoS collaborative system. This work forms a basis for building a web-based SoS collaborative system to support Department of Defense SoS acquisition programs.