Airborne platform capability assessment

It is expected that the multimode weapons systems of the future will be highly fault tolerant, possessing the ability to perform tactical missions with both full or degraded functional capabilities. The fault-tolerant system characteristics will allow systems with less than the fully specified functional capabilities to be engaging in combat. This design feature will present the operators of these weapons system with the operational challenge of selecting and/or assigning weapons platforms with degraded capabilities to carry out tactical missions. An in-system assessment process is proposed to evaluate the operability for these weapons platforms on the basis of current functional status, the reliability of the hardware resources within the system's avionics, and the resources required by the various application modes to accomplish mission tasks