System of Systems Requirements Capacity Allocation

Traditional systems engineering requirements allocation follow a serial process to assign individual systems to execute objectives. When a System of Systems (SoS) is being developed, serial allocation of system requirements may be less suitable, and ensuring requirements loading is properly balanced between systems and that SoS requirements are covered (and not overly covered) by available systems may be less clear. This paper explores a methodology to quantitatively measure the requirements loading of each system to achieve SoS objectives. The approach seeks to maximize the coverage of functional requirements with a minimal number of systems, but also seeks to explore the balance of system responsibilities within the entire SoS to prevent over tasking of a particular piece of the SoS, and thus prevent the SoS objectives from being achieved. The paper seeks to identify a methodology of SoS requirements allocation to explore the contributions and redundancies of how the SoS requirement s are assigned to individual systems. SoS requirements may also impose additional interoperability requirements in order to execute the objectives, but may be traded off with a lower and less demanding number of system requirements. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection