In systems engineering, verification activities evaluate the extent to which a system under development satisfies its requirements. In large systems engineering projects, multiple firms are involved in the system development, and hence verification activities must be coordinated. Self-interest impedes the implementation of verification strategies that are beneficial for all firms while encouraging each firm to choose a verification strategy beneficial to itself. Incentives for verification activities can motivate a single firm to adopt verification strategies beneficial to all firms in the project, but these incentives must be offered judiciously to minimize unnecessary expenditures and prevent the abuse of goodwill. In this paper, we use game theory to model a contractor-subcontractor scenario, in which the subcontractor provides a component to the contractor, who further integrates it into their system. Our model uses belief distributions to capture each firm’s epistemic uncertainty in their component’s state prior to verification, and we use multiscale decision theory to model interdependencies between the contractor and subcontractor’s design. We propose an incentive mechanism that aligns the verification strategies of the two firms and using our game-theoretic model, we identify those scenarios where the contractor benefits from incentivizing the subcontractor’s verification activities.

中文翻译：

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验证活动与激励措施的协调：一家两家公司的模型

在系统工程中，验证活动评估正在开发的系统满足其要求的程度。在大型系统工程项目中，系统开发涉及多个公司，因此必须协调验证活动。自身利益阻碍了对所有公司都有利的验证策略的实施，同时鼓励每个公司选择对自己有利的验证策略。验证活动的激励措施可以激励单个公司采用对项目中所有公司都有利的验证策略，但必须明智地提供这些激励措施，以尽量减少不必要的支出并防止滥用善意。在本文中，我们使用博弈论对承包商-分包商场景进行建模，其中分包商向承包商提供一个组件，承包商将其进一步集成到他们的系统中。我们的模型使用置信分布来捕捉每个公司在验证之前其组件状态的认知不确定性，并且我们使用多尺度决策理论来模拟承包商和分包商设计之间的相互依赖性。我们提出了一种激励机制，使两家公司的验证策略保持一致，并使用我们的博弈论模型，确定承包商从激励分包商的验证活动中受益的那些场景。我们使用多尺度决策理论来模拟承包商和分包商设计之间的相互依赖性。我们提出了一种激励机制，使两家公司的验证策略保持一致，并使用我们的博弈论模型确定承包商从激励分包商的验证活动中受益的那些场景。我们使用多尺度决策理论来模拟承包商和分包商设计之间的相互依赖性。我们提出了一种激励机制，使两家公司的验证策略保持一致，并使用我们的博弈论模型，确定承包商从激励分包商的验证活动中受益的那些场景。