The impact of technical complexity on the decision to collaborate and combine

In this paper, we investigate how technical complexity affects the decision to collaborate or combine. First, we discuss a model that mimics the system architecting process that was used on the National Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). Next, we present a metric that can be used to assess technical complexity and risk during the early system architecting phase of a program. We combine our technical complexity metric and additional measures of lifecycle cost and requirement satisfaction to evaluate a large tradespace of joint and single-agency, single-mission system architectures that we generate with our NPOESS model. Finally, we illustrate how agencies´ decisions to collaborate and combine depend highly on agency preference, on the cost of collaboration, and on the final system architecture that is selected.