Complex System Reliability Analysis using a Model-Based Shared Systems Simulation

The continued growth of system complexity is challenging traditional qualitative, heuristics-based approaches to architecting system emergence. As these emergent attributes are products of the architecture and established early in the system development lifecycle, where ambiguity is most pronounced, a shift to a model-based approach is viewed as essential to understanding system interdependencies and the impacts of tradeoff decisions. This paper discusses how model-based systems engineering methods and a coupled architecture-simulation can be used to model system reliability. Employing a probabilistic model of system element failure, the coupled simulation is shown to predict system reliability for various architecture configurations early in the system design process. The advantages this quantitative system performance assessment provide to stakeholder decision-making are reviewed, and the simulation model is extended to demonstrate how the complexity-resilience tradeoff can impact system reliability. Copyright © 2023 by Jeremy Ross. Permission granted to INCOSE to publish and use.