LASSO – Lunar Architecture Stochastic Simulator and Optimizer

The Lunar Architecture Stochastic Simulator and Optimizer (LASSO) is a simulationbased capability, based upon discrete event simulation (DES), for evaluating and optimizing flight element options for lunar transportation architectures. This simulation capability improves the ability to rapidly measure cost, reliability, and schedule impacts of various toplevel architecture decisions and individual elements within an architecture. The ability to probabilistically simulate and even optimize an overall transportation approach represents a significant enhancement over current deterministic analysis capabilities for top-level decision making. LASSO integrates a database of flight elements in Microsoft Excel® with architecture models in Rockwell Software’s Arena®. The Arena models are further integrated into Phoenix Integration’s ModelCenter® to allow optimization of the overall architecture by selecting various combinations of elements from the database. Sample results are presented for an expendable and a reusable lunar transportation architecture to illustrate the capabilities of LASSO for top-level decision making.