A Systematic and Traceable MOSA Evaluation Process for Systems Architectures: A Digital Engineering Tool

Abstract

A process for evaluating the degree to which an architecture embraces Modular Open Systems Approaches (MOSA) is germane to ensuring that MOSA principles are actually used in the development of defense systems architectures. Furthermore, such a process provides artifacts that can be used by program offices to justify their key architectural decisions and prove they embrace MOSA as required. Therefore, an approach which facilitates the assessment of architecture requirements for MOSA compliance—rather than system designs or products—provides the added benefit of ensuring applicable MOSA quality attributes are incorporated into architectures during the requirements development phase. To this end, a systematic and traceable MOSA evaluation process which uses derived sets of evaluable criteria to evaluate architecture requirements is developed. The process utilizes a digital engineering approach to establish, within the authoritative source of truth (model), traceability relationships that can be queried, analyzed, and used to validate whether the architecture and resultant system will exhibit modularity and openness characteristics.