Integrated design, evaluation, and decision making for small satellite design

The design process of complex systems can be made more effective if the designers have the ability to create, evaluate, and trade-off preliminary designs in a single integrated environment. Such an environment has been created for the design of a small satellite bus for tactical mission applications. The program literally allows the designer to build a satellite from the ground up, allowing him to select individual satellite subcomponents with their specific attributes and specify where they are to placed within the satellite. The program next evaluates the proposed design against a number of established performance metrics and checks for constraint violations. Then, using user-defined value functions and weights, the program computes value scores and a single weighted composite score. The program allows direct comparison of multiple designs in terms of both individual performance measures and total scores, and can easily adapted to include other performance measures, component types, and component characteristics. The internal evaluation models can be changed at will to adapt to the current level of design detail.