Academic application of trade‐off studies to support a CubeSat project

Abstract

Academic CubeSat projects offer students and researchers hands-on engineering experience and can deliver cutting-edge research data. The CubeSat projects are highly multidisciplinary and require teamwork skills as well as engineering expertise. A challenge for academic CubeSat projects is the high turnover of graduating students, which makes knowledge management complicated. Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) offers functionality that can address many of the challenges academic CubeSat teams experience. This paper presents a trade-off study using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to select an MBSE software for use by students. Literature on academic application of formal trade-off studies in student teams is limited. The case study described here shows how tangible and intangible factors are addressed using the AHP method, and a discussion of the process and results is provided. and in the teamwork and interpersonal domains. Directions chosen to share information and generating knowledge in the team influence the design quality. In addition, the team members have different backgrounds and interests for the satellite project (the intervention system) and their role in the project team (realization system) (Martin 2004).Academic CubeSat projects are challenged by a high turnover of students because of graduation, and many students join without prior knowledge of aerospace engineering or teamwork experience. Having good on-boarding and off-boarding processes, and an approach to knowledge management is important. Previous research suggests that there are challenges related to project management, balancing school work and satellite project work, ensuring momentum and project success. Moreover, research shows that the failure of many university CubeSat missions can be attributed to a lack of system-level testing and ad-hoc processes (Langer and Bouwmeester 2016, Faure 2017). The work in this paper is based one of the author's 2021 master thesis. More details can be found in the thesis online (Rovik 2021).