The implications and challenges for Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) are increasing. The entire software design and development process is affected by the impact of human, organisational, and social issues. Collaboration with different disciplines is becoming necessary in order to fully understand issues that do not obviously fall within the remit of software engineering practices. ESE can ...

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This paper explores the use of decomposition-based methods for aircraft family design. The traditional approach in multidisciplinary design optimization is to decompose a problem along disciplinary lines. For aircraft family design problems, a more natural approach is decomposition by individual aircraft. This decomposition facilitates the concurrent development of several aircraft variants, pr...

The problem of new attributes and the induced uncertainties has been extensively discussed in this paper. The methodology of uncertainty multidisciplinary design optimization has also been extended to spacecraft conceptual design in the presence of new attributes. The application of this methodology on fractionated spacecraft indicates that the proposed method is able to provide useful informat...