An Integrated Method for Selecting Architecture Alternatives and Reconfiguration Options Towards System-of-Systems Resilience

Delivering persistent values in a dynamic environment is a challenging but imperative capability for a system-of-systems (SoS). Practitioners in the SoS and defense domains are exploring the benefits of the operational-level reconfiguration strategies via new operational concepts such as mosaic warfare. However, an architecture design that allows reconfiguration is also a crucial task, but has not yet received adequate attention, not to mention accounting for the mutual impact between architecture design alternatives and reconfiguration options. Therefore, this paper proposes an integrated method that can select the architecture with a specific inherent structure in the design phase that supports dynamic reconfiguration during the operational phase. This method firstly builds a structural framework that connects architecture design and reconfiguration, and identifies the enablers for SoS architecture reconfiguration. After developing an SoS effectiveness evaluator, the method constructs an integrated multi-objective formulation for the initial architecture selection and reconfiguration process, and provides a solution algorithm based on a fast non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm. An application to an air and missile defense SoS illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed method. The generated Pareto optimal set of solutions that have non-dominated recoverability and survivability provide useful decision support for SoS composition and initial architecture configuration, based upon which an SoS can also respond effectively to disruptions by computing the reconfiguration decisions.