A UAV Case Study with Set‐based Design

Abstract

The DoD and Engineered Resilient Systems (ERS) community seek to leverage the capabilities of model‐based engineering (MBE) early in the design process to improve decision making in AoAs. Traditional tradespace exploration with point‐based design often converges quickly on a solution and engineering changes are required after this selection. Set‐based design considers sets of all possible solutions and enables down‐selecting possibilities to converge at a final solution. Using an Army case study and an open source excel add‐in called SIPMath, this research develops an integrated MBE model and example that simultaneously generates numerous designs through physics models into the value and cost tradespace allowing exploration for set‐based design analysis and producing a better efficient frontier than traditional point‐based design AoAs. Grouping design decisions into sets based on their characteristic decision, and simultaneously evaluating the value and cost tradespace, allows for a set‐based design approach that provides insight into the design decisions.

Set‐based design: The state‐of‐practice and research opportunities

“…From this set, we identified and collected only refereed journal articles and conference papers, reducing the set to the 64 SBD specific documents considered in the final review. We refer to this set of documents as Group A throughout the remainder of this paper 2–65 . We provide the complete listing for all Group A documents in Table 1.…”

A Concept for Set‐based Design of Verification Strategies

“…Historical analysis of the use of set-based design has shown that it inherently eliminates root causes of rework in system development (Kennedy et al, 2014). Researchers have integrated set-based design with tradespace exploration to further strengthen its value by leveraging the numerous solutions that tradespace exploration provides to generate the initial set (Small et al, 2018). However, empirical research about the implementation of set-based design in an industrial setting showed that there are some discrepancies as to how operationalize the approach (Hansen and Muller, 2012).…”

Demonstrating set-based design techniques: an unmanned aerial vehicle case study

“…14 Gundlach’s textbook, “Designing unmanned aircraft systems: a comprehensive approach” 19 is used as the primary basis for all physical architecture descriptions of the notional UAVS and requirements as well as many of the mathematical relationships that propagate design decisions regarding value and cost. 20 Many of the other mathematical relationships are based on observations from UAV descriptions from Compendium Drone 2013. 21…”

“…In addition, this research also seeks to develop methods to incorporate MBE, resilience quantification, uncertainty in physics-based parametric performance models, cost, and value models into SBD. This article summaries work from a thesis research project 15 funded by the ERS program.…”