ADVENTIUM ENTERPRISES, LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: A18-134

Description

When upgrading or redesigning a complex system, it is crucial to understand the ripple effect of design changes on the system's resulting costs, especially costs related to re-certification. System-level requirements cut across multiple design domains, including 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 Tooling to Understand Ripple Effect Costs (TUREC) project will make Adventium's existing Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) tools change-aware, implementing a change impact cost estimation from each tool's point-of-view. The change impact cost measurements are then rolled up into Adventium's Trade Space Explorer that enumerates and visualizes for the developer at the system level the impact their changes have on overall costs. The developer defines how change impact is weighted within the individual analysis tools 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.  Phase I established feasibility by adapting an existing tool to be change-aware and demonstrating it in the context of an Army-relevant, comprehensive system model to provide a realistic test scenario. By the conclusion of Phase II, TUREC's change impact capabilities will be integrated into multiple analysis tools  deployed on Adventium's CAMET Library  and supporting AADL and SysML modeling languages. In addition, CAMET sponsors will also have access to the steps and technology needed to convert third-party tools to be change-aware. TUREC will help system developers identify and measure the impact of their proposed design changes on the eventual certification costs. The significance is that weapon system capability will be enhanced by lowering risks to schedule and budget.