Modeling and Simulation in System Life Cycle

AbstractM&S plays a key role in ensuring the success of innovative systems, which meet existing needs or introduce new standards, by disrupting the status quo. In last decades the technological evolution offered the opportunity to broaden the fields of application of digital equipment, making them ubiquitous. Giving examples of this is almost pointless, since everyone observes the evolution of the “classic” products into new products, which very often result from the hybridization of different devices. Cell phones are an obvious example. Nowadays besides voice communication services, they offer other forms of communicating as well as a myriad of other features. However, innovations have some risk of failure associated to them, for many different reasons. Acceptability of a product depends on a host of attributes which include cost, reliability, and usefulness. This work will address how M&S can be used to improve the support to the decision processes to define why systems are needed, what the best implementation alternatives are, and how to develop, operate and sustain them in an effective and efficient way. The discussion will focus the domain of defense systems, considering the characteristics and requirements of the different life cycle stages