Research on Assessment of Technical Importance Based on Weapon Technology System-of-Systems Network Model

Technological importance assessment is a fundamental problem in the field of technological innovation management research. Assessing the importance of weapon technology can help to identify the innovative and disruptive technologies, and is of considerable significance to the future development and planning of weapon technology. From the perspective of system-of-systems and the complex network theory, this paper puts forward a unified frame to evaluate the technical importance based on a technology system-of-systems network model. First of all, considering the complicated correlation between weapon technologies, the weapon technology system-of-systems is modeled as a complex network by abstracting the technical entities as nodes and the relationships between technologies as edges. Next, three classical node centrality indexes of the complex network are introduced, and the TOPSIS method is utilized to synthesize the advantages of the three indexes to measure the node importance. Finally, a case of the unmanned combat technology system-of-systems is studied to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed method. The results show that our proposed method achieves excellent performance in evaluating the importance of the technical nodes, which provides useful insight into the management and development of technological innovation for the relevant decision-making departments.