Year
2016
Abstract
Over the last two decades a number of United States Government (USG) programs have established international partnerships and facilitated the installation of a large number of systems of systems (SoS) across the world. Based on their specific missions, the USG programs have defined and implemented a broad range of engagements leading to the system’s long-term operations continuing beyond direct US involvement. The importance of these program’s missions for homeland security, along with the sizeable US investment for system deployment and foreign personnel operations and sustainment training, requires the development and tracking of program performance and effectiveness metrics. This work considers Radiation Detection Systems (RDS) as a SoS and proposes a method for estimating the operational availability (AO). Since deployed systems constitute an important element of the overall program effectiveness, this paper offers a practical way of estimating one critical element of programmatic effectiveness. Calculating AO for a SoS presents unique challenges to reliability, availability, and maintainability assessment, modeling, and analysis. Given a SoS performing specified functions over a given timeframe, AO is modeled and estimated for specific reliability and maintainability operational performance characteristics and sustainment assumptions. The modeling methodology accounts for complexities due to system interdependencies and interrelated sustainment operations associated with logistics and planning. Since the individual systems interact with the operational environment and contribute to the overall SoS, modeling and simulation (modsim) is an effective approach to capture the complex operating, operable, and downtime hours of a SoS. The modeling approach coupled with modsim allows aggregation of AO estimates for individual components and systems to individual and multiple SoS levels focusing on supporting RDS deter, detect, and investigate functions. Given an RDS, we use subject matter expert knowledge of the system itself and the available data to define critical system components and develop a SoS model. The model, populated with representative notional data, will produce quantitative AO estimates at global (the world), regional (multiple countries), country (multiple sites), site (multiple RDS), RDS (multiple components), and component levels. The accredited AO model can be applied to any complex SoS; e.g. a variety of detection and physical protection systems.