Incorporating a Measure of Uncertainty into Systems of Systems Development Performance Measures

Technical Performance Measures ( TPMs ) historically are used to help the Program Manager in predicting if a program is on a path to achieve required performance. When extended over a developmental timeline, TPMs have provided a deterministic approach for predicting expected operational performance. However, TPMs are difficult to derive for a complex acknowledged system of systems ( SoS ). An SoS Performance Measure ( SPM ) has been developed that is equivalent in purpose to TPMs and demonstrated for a deterministic state similar to TPM usage. However, reality indicates that many of the SoS component variables have significant uncertainty associated with them during the SoS development. Therefore, to more accurately account for the ability of an SoS to achieve its desired performance, this variability needs to be accounted for. This paper extends the deterministic SPM concept to a stochastic SPM to account for this uncertainty. An Antisubmarine Warfare ( ASW ) mission example is used, and demonstrates how this extension improves the effectiveness of the SPM methodology.