Estimating Statistical Performance of Ground Vehicles

In estimating the performance of a ground vehicle or for that matter any system it is often important to know what range its performance may vary. This information can be useful in many ways such as in developing requirements, estimating project risk, and logistics planning. In this paper an approach towards estimating the statistical performance of a ground vehicle is presented. First, a simple deterministic performance model of a wheeled vehicle is developed. A statistical model to estimate performance is then developed based on the deterministic model. Results obtained from the analysis of the deterministic and the statistical models are further presented and compared. As models get more detailed, the vehicle performance measures are often estimated using numerical simulations. In this paper, we present and evaluate an approximate modeling approach that could reduce the time involved in solving such problems.