Abstract
The recent trend in the war fields on the globe may be characterized by the network-centric warfare, which would, in turn, make the concept of weapon systems be changed. To this end, the concept of system of systems (SoS) has been introduced in literature. An SoS is a collection of multiple systems, each of which is an independent system and can be interoperable with each other. Thus, in defense domain each SoS is a big weapon system as a whole operated in actual environment and each element of it is also an independent smaller weapon system, but they should be interoperable via network among each other. The safety results studied for each elementary system alone may not be fully applicable to the whole SoS. As such, the objective of this paper is to study how to make the SoS safety requirements be distributed down over the interoperable elementary systems. Since handling the interoperability requires a technique of systems architecture, a standard method called the DoD Architectural Framework (DoDAF) has been used here to derive a solution. Using DoDAF, the safety requirements were first analyzed in the operability environment. The results were then studied to be included in an integrated model of both the systems design and safety processes. A further study of present paper would facilitate ensuring safety in the development of SoS weapon systems in practice.
