Defense program quality-cost-delay optimization: architecture framework, a bridge between program management and system engineering

Military program management and system engineering re quire the expression of costs and delay trade-off with respect to system architecture. If architecture frameworks (AF) such as NATO (NAF) were designed to fill this common need, their current state is essentially descriptive. As it turns out, building defense systems architectures using those frameworks in a properly anticipated cost/delay budget envelope would require to have all system engineering already solved, because the architecture frameworks are designed to provide an explicit representation of the operational domain that can be used in analysis, for articulation of issues and requirements, as support to planning, and as a means of solution design and validation, among other things. Thus Quality-Resource-Time <Q,R,T> optimality in a regularly evolving environment cannot be represented in acceptable delay without automated optimization assistance. Our contribution in this article explores coupling architecture framework with operation research (OR) models to enable computer assisted design and evaluation of heterogeneous views in NATO Architecture Framework (NAF). Our illustrative example is a Linear Programming based bridge between program management and system engineering to anticipate <Q,R,T> optimal trade-offs. This article presents promising results, with which we hope to show how OR and AF will be indivisible in architecture evaluation process.