This program sought to avail itself of anticipated continuation in size reduction and performance improvement in electronic technology.The hope was for technology to enable a small aircraft to carry greater processing capacity than that being carried on aircraft the size of AWACS (Boeing 707).
The questions were: when and at what cost? Research performed by PRICE Systems professionals in the area of technology trend analysis demonstrates consistent and predictable behavior with transitions from one generation of technology to the next. As long as a function is in demand (such as power sourcing or digital processing), advances in techniques to deliver it (technology) will be tested to improve the efficiency with which it is delivered. For this program, that fundamental premise was validated for electronic signal processing and specific relationships were developed to predict size and technology index over time. The relationships were applied to the requirements of the next generation airborne collection & processing system to produce both an estimate of the size of the envisioned system as well as it's expected cost. And, since the basis for these predictions were supported by analysis of actual experience over a fairly large span of time, there was a degree of believability uncommon in many other approaches to this problem. The credibility was further bolstered by use of Risk Analysis to deal with the uncertainty in the predictions. This produced both a probability measure on the estimate and a confidence band of expectations.
The success of this project was a combination of sound background analysis by the PRICE consultants and a application of a tool (PRICE H) that is technology index sensitive.