Architecting Science: Practical Tools for Architecting Flexible Systems

Abstract : Three areas of architecting science were investigated: (1) Tradespace exploration is a conceptual design tool used to compare thousands of designs. Flexibility, the ability to dynamically change systems to mitigate risk or leverage opportunity, is difficult to assess within static tradespaces. A metric to identify valuably flexible designs in a tradespace, Value Weighted Filtered Outdegree, was developed and applied to a satellite radar and ORS case, and shown to identify designs that would not have been identified with existing tradespace metrics. (2) One cited mechanism for accommodating uncertainty in design is to embed flexibility. A new framework was developed in the research to aid the design of a flexible system. Change propagation analysis was extended for analysis of systems with heterogeneous relationships between components, using filtered outdegree analysis to quantify flexibility. (3) Decision makers utilize multiple criteria and many levels of reasoning to understand complex multivariate data. They can be aided by direct-perception decision-support systems of configural rather than separable displays. An experiment compared performance across different levels of reasoning, finding that configural display promoted better performance and more efficient eye fixation patterns at the highest level of reasoning than the separable display, and was the subjective tool of choice.