Ballroom 2 A comprehensive study on modeling requirements into value formulation in a satellite system application

Design of large-scale complex engineered systems (LSCES) depends on a large number of individuals. The design process of LSCES involves multiple organizations and numerous people working at different levels of these organizations. The current approach to designing LSCES is through traditional Systems Engineering (SE) practices, where the preferences of the stakeholders are communicated down the organizational hierarchy using requirements. The design is achieved once the requirements are satisfied. Requirements, however, represent what the stakeholder does not want rather than capturing stakeholder’s true preferences. This limits the exploration of the design space for possibly better outcomes that exist outside the feasible region defined by the requirements. An alternate approach is Value-Driven Design (VDD) applied to Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO), where a decomposable objective function (value function) is used to optimize the system. The role of VDD in such a formulation enumerates the preferences on a system that can be reflected in the attributes, which then form the value function and reduce the dependency on requirements. The value function is singular in unit (usually monetary in the case of commercial systems), enabling direct comparisons of design alternatives. This paper focuses on understanding how requirements that are inevitable can be captured using a value function through attributes associated with different levels of the hierarchy. A geo-stationary commercial communication satellite will be used as an example for the investigation.