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C H A P T E R 2 Research ApproachTo establish the feasibility of developing, operating, and main- taining a long-lived Reliability Archive, the research team assessed the technical, economic, and business aspects of the proposed system. The project began with two parallel tasks. The research team interviewed the SHRP 2 program director and senior program officers for the Capacity, Reliability, Renewal, and Safety pro- grams in order to establish the overall goals for the system, gather business requirements, and understand organizational and governance issues. The team also interviewed all active Reliability project contractors, plus the contractors for related Capacity projects C04 and C05, to understand the nature of the data that would eventually be archived and to gauge the con- tractorsâ preparedness for organizing and providing that data for archiving. Finally, the research team met with the general counsel of the National Academies in order to understand any legal or institutional issues with respect to data rights that might impact the feasibility of the Reliability Archive. On a separate track, the team conducted a literature survey to identify available and emerging technologies that might be applicable to the archive, find where similar systems have been deployed in government and industry, and identify issues and best practices. Based on this foundational work, the research team devel- oped a vision for the Reliability Archive that captured key high- level goals. In turn, these provided guiding principles for the development of a conceptual design and a detailed set of requirements for the Reliability Archive. Once agreement on vision, concept, and requirements was established, the research team enumerated desirable user6interfaces for the Reliability Archive based on the likely users of the system and their business requirements. The team also analyzed a range of technical and administrative issues that needed to be considered before alternative solutions could be explored. The research team then developed three alternative solution approaches that could satisfy the requirements developed through the research project. The team strove to be consistent with the spirit of the L13 project request for proposal (RFP), considered a broad range of conceptsâoutsourcing and/or hosting of data outside the National Academies was men- tioned specifically as a concept to considerâand developed at least one alternative that was simple and straightforward while ensuring that all the alternatives proposed were practical. The team also took into account the practicality of various tech- nical implementation options, considering the institutional framework under which the Reliability Archive would be deployed and managed. A life-cycle cost model was developed to identify all of the initial and recurring costs likely to be incurred over the service life of the Reliability Archive. A storage capacity siz- ing model was also developed for the Reliability Archive, inasmuch as data storage is a significant contributor to cost in any archive. Using these models, a 25-year life-cycle cost analysis was performed for each of the three solution alter- natives. The benefits to major stakeholders as well as the technical and business risks of each solution alternative were analyzed. The output of this cost/benefit/risk analysis was a final recommendation on the feasibility of the proposed Reliability Archive.
