Addressing Cost Increases in Evolutionary Acquisition

In 2003, the Department of Defense directed that Evolutionary Acquisition (EA), often referred to as spiral development, become the preferred approach for the acquisition of major weapon systems. Under EA, development, testing, production and fielding of a system take place in increments, once the system reaches a certain stage of maturity. We contend that EA was adopted without consideration of the impact of this approach on logistics support of the system. The result could be degradation of support to each increment of the system and of operational availability. We recommend policy changes that could mitigate the effect of EA on logistics support by elevating the role that logistics play in the testing and milestone approval process for systems acquired using this approach.

Traditionally, the US military has sought and achieved asymmetric military advantage, i.e. delivered tactical blows, quickly, in the right places. However, lately, non-state terrorists have seized the asymmetric advantage. They use cutting edge Commercial-Off-the-Shelf Information Technology (COTS IT) for agile Command, Control, Communications, Computer and Intelligence (C4I). US Military, by contrast, is hamstrung by brittle, archaic MILSPEC C3I kit, and by a crushing bureaucracy that resists refreshing the technology at anything approaching Internet speeds. Members of the US Naval Intelligence have voluntarily reached across stovepipes to re-establish tactical asymmetric advantage, through Rapid Evolutionary Acquisition (REA) of game-changing IT. It's not about the technology per se; it's about using IT to give warfighters "information high ground." Accordingly, REA adapts best practices from success cases in government and industry. Meanwhile, Congress has demanded DoD fix its broken IT acquisition processes. This REA initiative serves as an exemplar.

2007

In 2003, the Department of Defense directed that Evolutionary Acquisition (EA), often referred to as spiral development, become the preferred approach for the acquisition of major weapon systems. Under EA, development, testing, production and fielding of a system take place in increments, once the system reaches a certain stage of maturity. We contend that EA was adopted without consideration of the impact of this approach on logistics support of the system. The result could be degradation of support to each increment of the system and of operational availability. We recommend policy changes that could mitigate the effect of EA on logistics support by elevating the role that logistics play in the testing and milestone approval process for systems acquired using this approach. = =^Å èìáëáíáçå=oÉëÉ~êÅÜ=mêçÖê~ã= do^ar^qb=p`elli=lc=_rpfkbpp=C=mr_if`=mlif`v-ii-k^s^i=mlpqdo^ar^qb=p`elli= THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK = =^Å èìáëáíáçå=oÉëÉ~êÅÜ=mêçÖê~ã= do^ar^qb=p`elli=lc=_rpfkbpp=C=mr_if`=mlif`v-iii-k^s^i=mlpqdo^ar^qb=p`elli=

2018

In the Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition environment, many organizations have not seriously considered adopting a product line approach or are reluctant to because it is not a well-understood acquisition paradigm. Nonetheless, a compelling case can be made for adopting a product line approach because it addresses a problem facing many program managers today's how to cost-effectively acquire, develop, and maintain a set of related software-intensive systems and how to respond to the needs of greater product agility in the face of the current DoD transformation. This technical note chronicles the decisions a program manager might face in considering the adoption of a product line approach. This report uses a hypothetical acquisition to focus on why an acquisition organization should consider adopting a product line approach ?"instead of the traditional stovepipe approach ?"when acquiring a number of software-intensive systems that have a lot in common. The technica...

Procedia Computer Science, 2013

The evolution of System of Systems (SoS) architectures is a difficult process due to the complex interactions between entities that exist in an SoS. Adequate tools are thus needed in capturing these interdependencies to support informed decisions on architectural evolutions. In this paper, an approach is introduced to facilitate decision making on architecture evolution strategies. The main purpose of evolving architecture is to satisfy advanced capability and performance objectives through adding new systems, replacing existing systems, changing links, etc. The paper employs Colored Petri Nets (CPN), a powerful discrete event dynamic simulation tool, to model, simulate and evaluate the existing and evolving architectures. However, it is unrealistic to improve performance without considering the cost of architecture evolutions. This paper regards complexity as an indicator of the architecture evolving cost. Compared to other complexity metrics, dynamic complexity is included in the complexity metric in this paper. Eventually, an appropriate evolution choice could be achieved by examining the tradeoff space between complexity and performance. This approach is illustrated with a conceptual SoS problem.

IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 2000

A modularly upgradeable product allows customers to keep pace with technology by replacing modules instead of updating the entire unit, thus minimizing development and production costs for the firm. Despite these advantages, seemingly few consumer products are modularly upgradable (rather they are integral from the users' perspective). To offer possible explanations, and help guide firms in enhancing the relative attractiveness of modularity, we develop an economic model where the firm's frequency of product introduction and the end-users' frequency of upgrades are endogenous. We characterize the firm's introduction decisions under 1) an integral upgrade strategy, where the entire product is newly designed each generation, and 2) a modular upgrade strategy, where individually upgraded components are offered. We find that, contrary to intuition, the value of modularity diminishes with the overall rate of innovation in component technologies. On the other hand, the value of modularity increases with the difference in the rates of improvement between components, and increases when customers are more technically sophisticated, when production costs are high, and when the performance loss due to modularization is low.

18th Annual Forum on …, 2003

There is increased interest in the use of innovative modeling and simulation (M&S) tools to support the acquisition of defense systems. This paper discusses the results of two recent activities that were convened to shed light on this issue: a study by the National Research Council (NRC) entitled "Modeling and Simulation in Manufacturing and Defense Systems Acquisition: Pathways to Success" and a workshop sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) on "M&S to Support C4ISR Acquisition and Transformation". The paper concludes by identifying the major common themes that emerged from the two activities and potential next steps.

Bell Labs Technical Journal, 2002

Anais do Workshop sobre Aspectos Sociais, Humanos e Econômicos de Software (WASHES)

Software economics, acquisition, and pricing are important concerns, in particular for Systems-of-Systems (SoS). SoS are alliances of independent software-intensive systems combined to offer holistic functionalities as a result of the constituents interoperability. SoS engineering involves separately acquiring constituents and combining them to form the SoS. Despite the existence of cost prediction techniques at Systems Engineering practice, predicting SoS acquisition costs at design-time should include: 1) an analysis of the minimum set of constituents that offer a 'good enough' result, and 2) an analysis of the compatibility between the constituents to deliver the expected result. The main contribution of this paper is proposing a novel simulation-based method for cost prediction in constituents acquisition process, while considering the effectiveness of constituents combination to offer the intended functionalities, and predicting the lowest configuration, at design-time....