Combat Vehicle Programs: Product Development (PD) Resilience through Set-Based Design Application

Product development remains an uncertain process especially for highly engineered and complex DoD programs. Development uncertainties and evolving external factors encumber the balancing of conflicting design criteria and constraints using the existing trade-space exploration (TSE) and optimization and affordability analysis capabilities for solution concept generation and assessment during the material solution analysis and technology maturation and risk reduction phases. This proposal develops a framework for an innovative and comprehensive multi-stage set-based design approach driven trade-space optimization and exploration capability to support DoD’s PD processes and achieve PD life-cycle resilience. Proposed framework innovatively integrates the state-of-the-art of sequential decision making under uncertainty with combinatorial trade space optimization and exploration based on set-based design approaches. To cope with computational complexity, framework will design and detail intelligent and scalable value-iteration algorithms that guarantee optimality of set-based solutions as well as state-of-the art multi-criteria optimization algorithms. By integrating variable fidelity physics- and simulation-based analysis with efficient set-based design driven TSE and sequential decision optimization, proposed framework increases design resiliency and confidence. Additional functionality includes extensive and practical sensitivity analysis module, real-time PD decision support capability, visualization and characterizations of PD decisions in design criteria space and in terms of system designs.