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Early Stage Affordability Assessment Tool Development
Navy SBIR 2009.1 - Topic N091-044 NAVSEA - Mr. Dean Putnam - [email protected] Opens: December 8, 2008 - Closes: January 14, 2009 N091-044 TITLE: Early Stage Affordability Assessment Tool Development TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Information Systems, Ground/Sea Vehicles, Weapons ACQUISITION PROGRAM: NAVSEA 05D1 - Cross Platform System Development (CPSD) Program OBJECTIVE: The focus of this effort will seek to provide a methodology and supporting toolkits to perform full life cycle affordability analysis at the earliest stages of ship concept and force architecture design and assessment. The underlying aim of the effort is to provide the Naval Enterprise the means to properly balance the mix of acquisition and sustainment costs it will face, such that informed, defensible, and repeatable decisions can be made consistently and expediently. Given the present indicators in Naval acquisition budgets and the present state of ship life cycle cost management, achieving the right balance between acquisition and sustainment costs will be more critical going forward than is has ever been before. DESCRIPTION: The Navy currently has very limited capability to perform trade-offs of the full life-cycle affordability of a given ship concept, platform, or force architecture configuration at the earliest stages of design. In many cases, appropriate analysis of the affordability of a given ship concept or force architecture are deferred until much later in the development cycle, under the mistaken belief that estimates of affordability cannot be made with requisite certainty until more is known about the ship concepts being developed. Too often, this leads to missed targets for the later stage elements of life-cycle cost (i.e. sustainment costs), particularly when considered in conjunction with reliability and maintainability concerns. These missed life-cycle cost targets lead to recognized Naval Enterprise affordability issues, which often manifest themselves as late-stage design requirements changes and costly re-design efforts. Not surprisingly, these late stage changes often end up impacting both acquisition and sustainment costs in negative ways. Accordingly, an innovative analytically rigorous and repeatable methodology for approaching the challenge of total life cycle affordability is sought. It should complement the existing Navy ship concept design capabilities, embodied in tools like ASSET (Advanced Ship Synthesis and Evaluation Tool) and LEAPS (Leading Edge Architecture for Prototyping Systems) , as well as early stage ship concept and force architecture cost modeling capabilities such as NFAM (Naval Force Affordability Model) . It should provide an open and extensible toolkit, which in the end will be applicable to a wide range of long term, high capital cost investment decision making, beyond just the ship acquisition and operational regime. PHASE I: Concept paper describing an innovative methodology and associated tools development roadmap to support balancing and integration of acquisition and sustainment cost factors associated with early stage ship concepts and force architectures. The methodology needs to address the unique aspects of early stage concept and feasibility design efforts, wherein the intricate details of the ship or force architecture concept are not yet defined or adequately locked in to allow an item by item accounting for the expected cost factors. This will call on new and innovative predictive capabilities that might utilize approximated aggregations (roll-ups) based on logical collection of subordinate details. Further alternatives, applying even more unique approaches are encouraged, particularly if coupled with careful and methodical association of assumptions to the roll-ups is maintained throughout to ensure validity, precision, traceability and repeatability of the predictions. PHASE II: Refinement of the methodology laid out in Phase I, coupled with demonstration grade products, illustrating the usability and efficacy of the defined methodology in the context of early stage ship concept and force architecture development tasks. Developed software toolkit should have adequate documentation and support to enable evaluation in the context of ongoing ship concept and force architecture design activities. PHASE III: Given a successful demonstration of the methodology and associated toolkit in Phase II, the focus of efforts would shift to final refinement of the evolved methodology and manifestation of the final methodology in a fieldable and supportable ship concept and force architecture analysis tool. PRIVATE SECTOR COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL/DUAL-USE APPLICATIONS: Besides direct applicability and suitability to the Navy, such a methodology and software toolkit would prove valuable to any commercial or government entities making large capital investments in long-life items, including but not limited to plant and infrastructure investments, public works and utilities, and facilities utilized in support of provision of institutional capabilities. Additionally, manufacturers of non-disposable goods, even those with considerably smaller total life-cycle costs than naval vessels, could see benefits from application of the resultant integrated total life cycle affordability methodology within their product development processes. Such benefits would take the form of improved product competitiveness on the world marketplace, increase customer satisfaction, and reduced service infrastructure operating costs. REFERENCES: 2. MIL-HDBK-276-1, Military Handbook, Life Cycle Cost Model for Defense Material Systems, Data Collection Workbook, Global Engineering Documents, phone 1-800-854-7179 (3 February 1984). 3. MIL-HDBK-276-2, Military Handbook, Life Cycle cost Model for Defense Material Systems Operating Instructions, Global Engineering Documents, phone 1-800-854-7179 (3 February 1984). 4. Background on ASSET, LEAPS, and NFAM toolkits � http://www.dt.navy.mil/tot-shi-sys/des-int-pro/des-too-dev/index.html. KEYWORDS: Affordability; Sustainment; Acquisition; Cost; Modeling; Methodology.
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