Technology Portfolio Planning by Weighted Graph Analysis of System Architectures
Name
Crawley_Technology portfolio.pdf
Size
1.74 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
25348f1516e3e3c297c261d8b5d2fc98
Author(s)
Davison, Peter
Crawley, Edward F.
Cameron, Bruce Gregory
Date Issued
September 2014
Journal
Systems Engineering
Publisher
Wiley Blackwell
Citation
Davison, Peter, Bruce Cameron, and Edward F. Crawley. “Technology Portfolio Planning by Weighted Graph Analysis of System Architectures.” Systems Engineering 18, no. 1 (September 8, 2014): 45–58.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Many systems undergo significant architecture-level change throughout their lifecycles in order to adapt to new operating and funding contexts, to react to failed technology development, or to incorporate new technologies. In all cases early architecture selection and technology investment decisions will constrain the system to certain regions of the tradespace, which can limit the evolvability of the system and its robustness to exogenous changes. In this paper we present a method for charting development pathways within a tradespace of potential architectures, with a view to enabling robustness to technology portfolio realization and later architectural changes. The tradespace is first transformed into a weighted, directed graph of architecture nodes with connectivity determined by relationships between technology portfolios and functional architecture. The tradespace exploration problem is then restated as a shortest path problem through this graph. This method is applied to the tradespace of in-space transportation architectures for missions to Mars, finding that knowledge of pathways through the tradespace can identify negative coupling between functional architectures and particular technologies, as well as identify ways to prioritize future technology investments.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1002/sys.21287
