The Relevance of Trade Studies in Your Design Process

ssa-trade-studies — Trade studies mostly go hand in hand with high-level architecture design.

How can a company make informed and rational decisions to balance the system’s objectives and constraints? Trade studies are a tool for choosing the best option out of many options for a problem (computing, storage, etc.). They also examine potential choices against a set of requirements or objective criteria to lay out each solution’s benefits and limitations clearly.

When to Involve Trade Studies

Trade studies mostly go hand in hand with high-level architecture design. This typically occurs as project requirements are compacting, before coding begins. In addition, trade studies constantly continue to be helpful throughout any project, and several options must be selected. The new decision point could happen due to receiving results of a research spike, changing requirements, or identifying unseen challenges. At Systems Strategies & Analysis (SSA, Inc.), we provide our customers with complete systems engineering lifecycle support using MBSE, including trade studies. Call SSA today at 240-813-4427 for any questions!

Reasons for Using Trade Studies

A trade study may help your business enhance your systems analysis with several advantages:

Help you communicate the requirements, system objectives, and constraints to the design team and stakeholders
Explore and assess the trade-offs and impacts of various alternatives on the system performance, schedule, cost, and risk
Explain and document your decision-making process and rationale based on objective and data
Identify and minimize the risks linked with the system design or solution

Examples of Trade Studies

Trade studies are usually used in different systems engineering applications, such as defense, aerospace, healthcare, and transportation. For example, SSA can help you use trade studies to consider usability, functionality, security, compatibility, and maintainability to compare different architectures for a software system. Moreover, some companies use this tool to analyze various transportation modes for a city based on convenience, speed, affordability, accessibility, safety, and sustainability.

Conducting Trade Studies

Although trade studies can differ in scope, they tend to follow the prevalent pattern below:

Collaborate with stakeholders to determine the requirements for the functionality you are attempting to build
Develop evaluation criteria to measure stand-in for potential abstract requirements
Brainstorm solutions to the problem
Examine shortlisted solutions against the evaluation criteria
Compare results and pick a solution

Contact SSA, Inc. Today for Systems Engineering Consulting Services

If you have any questions regarding our systems engineering consulting services, contact Systems Strategies & Analysis today. From program/project management services to Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE)/Model Based Engineering (MBE) training, our team has the skills and expertise to quickly design, build, integrate, and operate software-intensive, enterprise-wide systems. We provide every client with comprehensive solutions to satisfy their unique goals. Contact SSA, Inc. by calling our support team at (240)813-4427 or sending us a message via our website. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Pinterest for company news and updates.