Synthesis of Existing Cost Models to Meet System of Systems Needs

Today’s need for more complex, more capable systems in a short timeframe is leading more organizations towards the integration of existing systems into network-centric, knowledge-based system-of-systems (SoS). Software and system cost model tools to date have focused on the software and system development activities of a single software system, but none to date adequately estimate the integration of multiple systems into an SoS. This paper presents an overview of the activities that must be included in an SoS cost model and describes an approach for estimating SoS effort using the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO) suite of estimation tools to estimate SoS Lead System Integrator (LSI) effort as well as the total SoS development effort.