Verification activities, such as inspection, testing, analysis, and demonstration, improve one's confidence in the system meeting the system requirements during the development process. Frequent verification is often advocated as a strategy that minimizes costs of rework over the entire design process, where frequent verification involves verifying after any change in the design. However, this strategy is yet to be validated. In this paper, we develop a belief‐based model of verification in systems design to determine the conditions under which frequent verification is an optimal strategy for a vertically integrated organization. Our model uses belief distributions to capture the organization's dynamic confidence in the system design meeting a requirement of interest during the development process. It also captures the organization's dynamic confidence in the correctness of its development activities (or design process) as a function of past verification activities and current system maturity. The analysis of our model shows that frequent verification is a cost‐minimizing strategy for any level of belief in satisfying the requirement only when the organization has high confidence in the correctness of its design activities and the expected cost to rework a faulty design is greater than the costs to set up the verification activities throughout the development process. Otherwise, strategies with infrequent verification are superior. Our work contributes to the growing body of literature on the theoretical foundations of systems engineering and engineering design and seeks to provide practitioners with a means to determine optimal verification strategies.

中文翻译：

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垂直集成系统频繁验证的最优性评估

在开发过程中，诸如检查，测试，分析和演示之类的验证活动可提高人们对满足系统要求的系统的信心。通常提倡频繁验证是一种在整个设计过程中将返工成本最小化的策略，其中频繁验证涉及在设计中进行任何更改之后进行验证。但是，该策略尚未得到验证。在本文中，我们开发了系统设计中基于信念的验证模型，以确定频繁验证是纵向集成组织的最佳策略的条件。我们的模型使用信念分布来捕获组织对系统设计的动态信心，从而满足开发过程中感兴趣的需求。它还捕获了组织的 对开发活动（或设计过程）的正确性的动态信心，这取决于过去的验证活动和当前系统的成熟度。对我们模型的分析表明，只有在组织对其设计活动的正确性具有高度信心并且对有缺陷的设计进行返工的预期成本大于在整个开发过程中进行验证活动的费用。否则，不经常进行验证的策略会更好。我们的工作为系统工程和工程设计的理论基础上不断增长的文献做出了贡献，并力求为从业人员提供确定最佳验证策略的手段。