Development of a test-bed for knowledge-intensive system architecture optimization

System Architecture [1] is the high-level design of a system, defining the main elements of function and form, the mapping between function and form, and the interfaces between elements of function and form, and between the system and the surrounding context. Several studies have highlighted the importance of system architecture [2], as it is a point in the design process of unique leverage: most of the lifecycle cost of a system is committed after the system architecture phase[3], and a similar argument can be made for performance. The author introduced the VASSAR framework for knowledge-intensive architecture optimization [4]. The VASSAR framework is essentially an architecture evaluation and optimization framework, which combines a rule-based engine for evaluation with several heuristic optimization strategies. The VASSAR framework has been applied to multiple large aerospace systems [5-7]. The performance of several domain-independent and domain-specific heuristics was also compared in some preliminary experiments [8].