A need for reduction in cost has driven many aerospace companies to consider using Commercial‐off‐the‐shelf (COTS) hardware products during a space‐based system design and development phase. Newly developed fixed‐price space systems have a difficult challenge to address; they need to optimize their processes and requirements for cost while still adhering to the appropriate level of risk and rigor for their project. For many government‐funded fixed‐price projects, there is still an expectation of compliance to government standards and associated proof, which can be a challenge when evaluating usage of COTS hardware that may contain limited documentation. This paper presents research done to date for COTS usage in both the software and hardware domains, building upon this to provide a framework for evaluation and verification of COTS hardware assemblies used in a risk averse, cost constrained space‐based applications.

Use of design and construction standards have many benefits when trying to meet expectations on product safety and quality ‐ they help ensure commonality and consistency of approaches to design, manufacturing, test and verification. However, the use of standards can drive cost and inhibit innovation for certain applications. This leads to the question of when is it appropriate to constrain the design and apply standards on a program? This paper looks at the typical usage of design and construction standards across three different industries to evaluate when their usage enables projects, and when they drive cost. This paper provides the conclusion that optimization of a project for cost, technical and schedule is best served when standards are limited to industries with common products in a highly regulated domain. Usage of standards is not a “one size fits all” approach, and alternate strategies exist for industries in cases where limiting the design solution could impact ability to realize cost effective, innovative designs.

Like many project processes, requirements management can be time consuming and costly if not well planned. The fundamentals of the process steps can be obtained through literature search, however the variation of application can lead to program cost challenges if not tailored for the project's risk posture and budget scope. This paper investigates various published requirements management processes, presents a fundamental process model, demonstrates a method to capture the process steps using a Systems Modeling Language (SysML), and shows the results of a simulation of the process steps enabling a comparison of outcomes for a project. This method investigates an option of using duration constraints to calculate labor hours based on process steps, and uses inputs from the project's requirement data to provide a method of calculating systems engineering labor hours utilizing the Constructive Systems Engineering Cost Model (COSYSMO) in a SysML model. This work is intended to show how SysML can be used to support development and refinement of project processes in general, with specific focus on how this method can enable implementation of requirements management in a way that provides insight into potential cost and schedule impacts to the project.