A Landscape of Trades: The Importance of Process, Ilities, and Practice
Abstract
Tradespace analysis and all of the activities and elements required to make it successful across the various levels and domains is a highly challenging area. At their core, tradespaces are decision spaces. Tradespace creation, exploration, analysis, and the associated methods, processes, and tools that support them will vary in scope, purpose, respect the level of effort required to generate a tradespace appropriate to the stage of analysis, and always be crafted to produce steps forward in terms of building on or adding to the previously existing bodies of knowledge. This chapter will introduce these concepts and discuss the different needs across the Defense enterprise, operational, and system levels of analysis. The chapter will also present the highly challenging problem of system qualities (the “ilities”), which represent major stakeholder needs, but are a major source of project overruns and failures, stakeholder value conflicts, and are poorly defined and understood. System qualities provide a lens to aid our understanding of the difficult nature of bridging the operational and system-intrinsic viewpoints, each with their own needs and completely different levels of abstraction with respect to trades and yet are still co-dependent. Further, the systems engineering community must continue to develop new architectural or other descriptions to relate complex relationships across operational and system-intrinsic views, which is especially vital for new capabilities derived from software or artificial intelligence.
Leads
Valerie B. Sitterle
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Gary Witus
Wayne State University
Publications
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