Visual Simulation Objects (VSO) has been described by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) as the ?Next Generation? architecting tool.

It is the product of over 50 man-years of effort funded by eleven Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) contracts performed over the past seven years.

VSO has been developed with one goal: to expedite responsible decision making and accounta-
bility by the detailed analysis of business operations and systems.

While such investigations have always been performed in special cases, the Klinger-Cohen Information and Management Technology Reform Act of 1996 mandated it for new programs and thus became the prime mover for a renewed interest in describing complex operations and systems in a way that would enable a detailed mathematic analysis to be performed, the results of which would provide a way to evaluate and rank alternative architectures.