A New Model for Presenting Early Design Concepts: the Portfolio-of-Systems

The pace of technological change has aggressively accelerated in the last half century. Because of the rapid pace of technological change, new engineering systems and their development programs face significant challenges in managing complexity, particularly for novel, complex systems in aerospace and defense. System design is both an art and a science, especially as stakeholder needs and expectations drive designers to push the state-of-the-art in multiple dimensions for new systems. Designers for modern aerospace systems have a proclivity to focus on highly granular, low-level design elements even during the conceptual design phase for a new system. This ignores important system-level context and fails to provide system stakeholders an effective model around which they can build their mental models. As part of a framework to develop early design concepts for novel, complex systems in defense and aerospace, this work proposes a new model for presenting an early concept to stakeholder: the portfolio-of-systems. This model is a novel system view that leverages abstraction while extending Systems Theory and Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes (STAMP) to build and analyze new systems in context using a portfolio-of-systems control structure. This control structure is presented as a design artifact that extends the principles of STAMP to produce an early concept that is both requirements- and technology-agnostic, enabling a focus on context for a new system as an addition to a portfolio-of-systems.