Optimum technology insertion into systems based on the assessment of viability

Abstract

-Product sustainment means keeping an existing system operational and maintaining the ability to continue to manufacture and field versions of the system that satisfy the original requirements. Sustainment also includes manufacturing and fielding revised versions of the system that satisfy evolving requirements, which often requires the replacement of technologies used to construct the original system with newer technologies. Technology insertion involves determining which technologies to replace during a design refresh, i.e., deciding the design refresh content, and deciding when that design refresh should take place. Technology replacement decisions are driven by a broad range of issues including performance, reliability, environmental impact, cost, and logistics, and when, or if other design refreshes will take place.Traditional "value" metrics go part of the way toward providing a coupled view of performance, reliability and cost, but are generally ignorant of how product sustainment may be impacted. A metric that measures both the value of the technology refreshment and insertion, and its ability to support both the system's current and future affordability and capability needs including hardware, software, information and intellectual property is required. This paper discusses a concept called viability. Viability is a measure of the producibility, supportability, and evolvability of a system and can serve as a metric for assessing technology insertion opportunities.

Obsolescence Driven Design Refresh Planning for Sustainment-Dominated Systems

“…However, if a roadmap of value attributes for the product over time is available, it may be possible to extend methodologies like MOCA to consider design refresh coupled with optimum technology insertion redesign strategies. Possible methods for extending the refresh planning methodologies to address the technology insertion problem for sustainment-dominated systems have been proposed including the introduction values metrics that include sustainability (Ardis 2001) and the use of Bayesian networks to capture and implement the extended value metrics (Sandborn et al 2003).…”

Performance‐Based Logistics and Interfirm Team Processes: An Empirical Investigation

“…A sustainment‐dominated system (SDS) is defined as a system whose sustainment phase represents the highest cost and longest duration of any phase within its lifecycle (Sandborn et al. ). Large‐scale complex systems such as those found in aerospace and defense, utilities, healthcare, and social sciences are representative of sustainment‐dominated systems (Feng et al.…”

“…Owners, operators, and end system users are using performance-based strategies, such as performance-based logistics (PBL) to organize the post-production, and service delivery market, for what are now being called SDS (Singh and Sandborn 2006;Randall et al 2015). A sustainment-dominated system (SDS) is defined as a system whose sustainment phase represents the highest cost and longest duration of any phase within its lifecycle (Sandborn et al 2003). Large-scale complex systems such as those found in aerospace and defense, utilities, healthcare, and social sciences are representative of sustainment-dominated systems (Feng et al 2007;Rojo et al 2010).…”

System Development Planning via System Maturity Optimization

“…In the design of systems, component-level concerns involving integration, interoperability, and sustainment (e.g., producibility, supportability, and evolvability) become equally or more important, from a systems perspective, when used in an operational environment [27], although many of the factors that may determine the implementation of a system into its operational environment are not always effectively implemented in the interim of the developmental life cycle [28]. Fundamentally, any system under development is composed of core technology components and their linkages (i.e., architecture).…”