Economic-based Distributed Optimal Design

Spacecraft and launch systems are examples of complex products which require a careful balance between competing concerns, such as performance, weight, and reliability, to serve their mission. Complexity requires design by large engineering organizations, so this balance must be achieved across many teams of people working on various components. This paper uses optimization theory to derive a method for distributed optimal design. Each component design team is provided with a separate optimization problem such that, as each team finds the best design solution to their problem, the teams together design the best system. To date, distributed optimal design has been difficult because complex system design spaces have extremely high dimensions over which design objectives are poorly correlated. Instead, this paper proposes that design objectives be expressed as functions in attribute spaces, which have few dimensions and are much smoother than design spaces. Attribute spaces are generated from design spaces by traditional engineering analysis processes. Economic analysis of all parties to spacecraft launch and operation is used to construct a top-level value function on the system attribute space. This function is linearly decomposed into value functions for component attribute spaces. This provides the needed objective functions for distributed optimal design.