A Systems Complexity-based Assessment of Risk in Acquisition and Development Programs

The objective of this research project is to further development and research of a quantitative objective assessment of technical risks and failures in engineered systems based on previous year research (NPS BAA 14-002). This research aims to refine and expand the formulation, and modeling the complex risks and failure mechanisms in order to improve the current accurate subjective practice of assessment of risk in different stages of an engineered system development program as well as acquisition programs. Currently systems lifecycle risks are assessed subjectively by methodologies such as color-coded risk matrix that are heavily subjective in nature. Subsequently many engineered systems development programs suffer from unforeseen failures, cost and schedule overruns that are related to inaccurate risk identification and assessments. This research project proposes expanding on the novel approach to risk assessment by creating, refining and performing experiments with a set of appropriate complexity measures (informed by historical case studies) as pre-indicators of emergence of risks at different stages of a systems development process and lifecycle. Based on current ongoing research, we will refine the complexity measures in various stages of lifecycle of a system and will probe several historical case studies of engineered systems success or failures in relationship to our refined complexity measures in search of a quantitative relationship between increased complexity and risks. The focus of the case studies will be at the requirement and the preliminary design phase with application to multiple historical as well as theoretical case studies. The results of this research project will have a broad public purpose in systems development community in various domains of engineering by improving the quantitative assessment of risk from requirement phase through the preliminary and critical design phase, manufacturing and testing, implementation, operation and the retirement of the system. The complexity based risk assessment can be applied to various domains of applications such as telecommunication satellite design, regional power infrastructure design and operation, and the next generation of human spaceflight vehicle and many more. The suggested improved methodology can warn the program manager as well as the other stakeholders on assessing the alternative courses of action at each stage in systems lifecycle. Later direction of this research can suggest ways to reduce and manage the complexity content of a system and mitigating some of the technical risk that a system is facing.