A System-of-Systems Approach to the Strategic Feasibility of Modular Vehicle Fleets

The value proposition for ground vehicle modularity in the U.S. Army and other services has been a topic of continuing debate. Studies to date have largely focused on individual system elements such as manufacturing or maintenance, lacking a holistic perspective of the implications of modularity for the entire fleet operation and life-cycle. The U.S. Army Science and Technology community has demonstrated the technical feasibility of large-scale, transformative ground vehicle modularity, but the business case for modularity remains incomplete. There are multiple criteria tradeoffs between modular and mission-specific (conventional) vehicle platforms, such as total life-cycle cost, mission utility, personnel requirements, and fleet adaptability. This paper presents a system-of-systems framework to address these tradeoffs to support high-level decisions on the strategic feasibility of ground vehicle modularity. We demonstrate this framework with a notional example and an application to the Joint Tactical Transport System (JTTS), a U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center demonstrator program. Under certain modeling assumptions with regards to the operation of a modular fleet, results for the JTTS study indicate that modularity can lead to significant cost savings at the expense of increased personnel requirements.