Impacts of Change‐Type and State‐Type System Qualities on Complex System Architectures

System qualities, such as scalability, expandability, and reconfigurability, are key requirements of complex systems. Requirements associated with system qualities are important factors in design trade space analyses, but systems engineering design methodologies make only limited use of these qualities, hindering a holistic understanding of tradeoffs and their impact on system design and performance. This research defines system quality types and an ontology that expresses multiple system quality types for a system and associated analytical models. This process leverages software engineering quality attribute body of knowledge, Model Based Systems Engineering and the Systems Modeling Language, to incorporate system qualities, and provide traceable relationships to an Epoch‐Era Analysis model to enable a more holistic analysis of a system's performance. This approach enables the identification of system quality differentiators and their impact on system architecture. For this study, the designated system for holistic analysis is the Radio Cased System. Nine system qualities are considered for the system. The process delineated in this research and its application to the subject system demonstrate that when system quality impacts are incorporated into traditional modeling techniques, that system design and trade off analysis can be conducted holistically and efficiently, ensuring requirements are met without unduly impacting critical system qualities. Significance and Practitioner Points This research connects ilities and semantic system quality research, exploring how system qualities influence architecture and contribute to more holistic system designs and end products. Building upon prior research in ilities semantics, system quality types, and system quality definitions, this work developed SysML‐based representations, quantification methods, and analytical approaches to simultaneously examine multiple system qualities within a holistic system model. A key benefit of system quality types is the generic modeling, quantification, and analytical framework they provide for researchers investigating new quality types, definitions, and measures. Practitioners across different domains can leverage system quality semantics to develop domain‐specific system quality requirements while maintaining a consistent approach to modeling all system qualities. Furthermore, the traceability between system models and analytical models helps inform early architectural decisions. Such front‐end analysis can reduce both development time and cost by minimizing downstream rework.