Cost Effective Vv&a: Five Prerequisites

Recent requirements to establish the credibility of the models and simulations (M&S) that are used in Department of Defense (DoD) applications have resulted in the development of several approaches to M&S credibility assessment. Each of these approaches attempts to integrate verification and validation (V&V) activities into a formal process whose products (hopefully) support M&S accreditation. The cost of "VV&A" activities has not typically been a driving factor in the development of these processes, however, and their independent and fragmentary development has tended to result in "point-solution" approaches to the problem of costeffectiveness. Despite their diversity, however, many VV&A processes share features in common, suggesting that it may be possible to identify the essential elements of cost-effective VV&A. This paper proposes five "common sense" elements of cost-effective VV&A, and describes how each of these elements can contribute to the cost-effectiveness of VV&A processes in general. A comparative analysis of six VV&A processes currently in use to support M&S accreditation for a wide variety of DoD applications is then presented. The analysis reveals that the five elements proposed as essential to cost-effective VV&A do, in fact, characterize, in whole or in substantial part, all of the VV&A processes considered. The paper concludes by considering some of the evaluative implications of these findings.