Coupling Architecture Framework and Operation Research: the Case of NAF with Cost and Delay Driven Multi-Criteria Scheduling

Architecture frameworks are essential tools to model system of systems. The aim of the NATO Architecture Framework (NAF) is to provide a standard for developing and describing architectures for both military and business use. A main purpose is to contribute to the analysis and development of alternative architectures, evaluate and compare them. In this regard AF itself is not sufficient to evaluate alternative architectures and evaluation tools are needed ideally in a seamless way. In this paper we propose a coupling between NAF and operations research, NAF-OR, through linear programming in order to assess the various possible scheduling and resource derived from the different architectures. This in turn improves system design productivity.While management techniques in system engineering and program modifications are based on best effort to respect schedule and budget, this article introduces the benefits of using optimization to input validated data NAF through a significant example using multi-objective scheduling problem introducing NAF-OR, a method that combines NAF and Operation research.