Characterization of Technology Integration Based on Technology Readiness Levels

Integration is ubiquitous in systems development. Although much has been written about the need to explicitly characterize integration in the context of technology development and maturation, current technology readiness level evaluation methods do so implicitly or altogether incorrectly. It is argued that integration is an inherent subattribute of technology readiness and that technology readiness level descriptions hold some of the conceptual building blocks with which such an explicit characterization of integration may be constructed. To do so, the concept of integration in the context of technology maturation is elaborated on, drawn from well-established published work to generate characterizations of integration for each readiness level. These descriptions build upon fundamental concepts of systems integration such as system architectures, abstraction, interfaces, and interactions. The use of these generic descriptions to create specific ones for a representative emerging technology in aeronautics is illustrated. Lastly, the proposed approach is compared to prior work, and the case is made for the former’s advantages in benchmarking integration for a current assumed technology readiness level and articulating integration goals for higher levels of technology readiness.