| The changing global socio-economical and political environment is creating a paradigm shift in the aerospace industry. This paradigm shift calls for solutions that are beyond evolutionary databases and demands consideration of all aspects of the system's life cycle. The shift implies that a new means of evaluating the “goodness” of a system must be established and requires inclusion of three elements. The elements are as follows: consideration of the product life cycle in the early phases of design, new design methods to account for multiple criteria and uncertainty, and breakthrough technologies to meet aggressive performance and economic objectives of the future.; A new design method for complex systems was created as a response to the paradigm shift and was achieved with the use of statistical and probabilistic methods, including Response Surface Methods and Monte Carlo Simulations. The method accounts for the multi-criteria problem in the presence of design, operational, and technological uncertainty while allowing for the infusion and subsequent affordability assessment of immature technologies. The design method includes a forecasting environment whereby the decision-maker has the ability to easily assess and trade-off the impact of various technologies without sophisticated and time-consuming mathematical formulations. This objective was achieved by employing the use of Morphological analysis, forecasting analogies and techniques, and Multi-Attribute Decision Making techniques. Through the execution of the method, a family of design alternatives for a set of customer requirements can be identified and assessed subjectively or objectively. This method allows for increased knowledge, reduced committed costs and increased design freedom leverage to produce high quality and competitive cost systems in a systematic and comprehensive manner and is called the Technology Identification, Evaluation, and Selection, or TIES, method.; The TIES method was demonstrated on a High Speed Civil Transport concept. This vehicle was chosen as a benchmark for the method due to the technically challenging customer requirements and the need for revolutionary advances over present day technological capabilities to obtain feasible configurations. The TIES method established the need and the product specifications and identified the most suitable set of technologies to satisfy all customer requirements in a probabilistic design setting. |
