Rotorcraft Tradespace Exploration considering Cost and Availability

An Engineered Resilient System (ERS) draws upon engineering concepts, science, and design tools to produce effective and trusted solutions for a broad range of operational contexts [1]. One focus area within ERS is tradespace analytics with the ultimate goal of cost-effective design, development, testing, manufacturing, and fielding of trusted, assured, easily-modified systems [2]. A tradespace tool first populates a multi-dimensional solution space with information about possible designs. Next, a decision maker interactively evaluates competing alternatives. The term tradespace suggests that, between any pair of alternatives, one design may exhibit superior performance with respect to a subset of metrics but fall short in others. Therefore, selecting one design over another may necessitate sacrificing a margin of performance in some areas to achieve a desired level of performance in others. Thus, it is often the case that no single design stands out as the obvious choice because it is strictly better for every performance measure. Tradespace tools provide an environment to explore suitable alternatives in an intuitive manner so that the list of possibilities can be narrowed. Experts can then assess this short list of designs to determine their feasibility so a single design that is a reasonable compromise between all metrics of concern is selected.