Enabling Flexible Design of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles by Network-Based Analysis of Modular System Architectures

An increasingly important issue in the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is the problem of designing for flexibility, extensibility, and reconfigurability to meet a range of stakeholder needs while addressing requirements for performance and reliability. In general, UAV manufacturers design, develop, test, and deploy each vehicle on a case-by-case basis to meet specific mission requirements with little attention to retaining commonality across systems. The highly integral architectures of these systems are designed in that way for good reason. They generally have stringent requirements in terms of cost, efficiency, and reliability. As UAVs become more ubiquitous for civil, commercial, and military applications, however, this practice soon will no longer be sufficient to meet the expanding need for these types of aircraft. The goal of this research is to develop an approach for the design of modular platform architectures that provide mission flexibility while continuing to meet requirements for cost, efficiency, and reliability.