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

Army Combat Vehicles (CV) are complex systems that need to balance multiple performance characteristics; must perform well in battlefields with very different conditions and against adversaries with diverse sets of capabilities and engagement strategies; they have to be reliable and exhibit an economical life cycle cost; and they need to be adaptable to new technologies as they become available for field operations. Thus, it is essential to have tools that will facilitate considering and evaluating rapidly a large number of alternatives early in the design process; accounting for uncertainties associated with the tools used for performance assessments, the readiness of new technology, and the changing geopolitical threats. Set Based Design (SBD) is a method that performs design discovery through elimination of the worst designs, and relies exclusively on human interactions between engineers from different technical areas, project managers, and stakeholders for making decisions about which candidate design to eliminate from further consideration. The proposed research will develop a new framework which will embody the SBD and thus be very different from all available tools for design space exploration. The proposing team will utilize their expertise in deploying SBD across the entire Naval enterprise in the proposed effort.