Promoting Affordability in Defense Acquisitions: A Multi-Period Portfolio Approach

Abstract

The implementation of Better Buying Power policies seeks to achieve affordability across the spectrum of major defense acquisition programs. However, the technical and programmatic challenges associated with sequential decision-making in the acquisition of large scale, increasingly interdependent defense systems prompts a need for quantitative frameworks that can better address the complexities of negotiating capability, schedule, and cost, while fulfilling target objectives of affordability. Our proposed research extends prior funded work and adopts innovations from financial engineering to enable quantitatively informed multistage decision-making under uncertainty. The method provides a means of assessing tradeoffs between capability, cost, and schedule risks, and the ability to objectively make sequentially dependent acquisition decisions on a portfolio of systems, towards some desired overarching capability. We adopt a dynamic programming approach using statistical measures and optimization techniques that balance short term decisions against long term implications on dimensions of cost, risk, and schedule. The method is demonstrated for the concept case of multi-stage acquisitions in a naval acquisition scenario.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 30, 2014
Accession Number
ADA624550

Entities

People

  • Daniel A. DeLaurentis
  • Navindran Davendralingam

Organizations

  • Purdue University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Engineered Resilient Systems
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • Commerce
  • Computer Programming
  • Defense Systems
  • Department Of Defense
  • Dynamic Programming
  • Engineering
  • Littoral Combat Ships
  • Mathematical Programming
  • Military Acquisition
  • Operations Research
  • Optimization
  • Software Prototyping
  • System Of Systems
  • Systems Engineering
  • Uncertainty
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Life Cycle Cost Analysis
  • Operations Research
  • Strategic Security Studies