Statistical risk estimation for communication system design: Development of optimization frameworks

The design of a spacecraft is an evolutionary process that starts from requirements and evolves over time across different design phases. During this process, a lot of changes can happen. They can affect mass and power at component level, at subsystem level, and even at system level. Each spacecraft has to meet overall constraints in terms of mass and power: for this reason, it's important to be sure that the design does not exceed these limitations. Current practice in system modeling deals with this problem by allocating margins on single components and on each of the subsystems. However, a statistical characterization of these fluctuations in mass and power is missing, and the consequence is a design that either is too risky and does not fit the mission constraints, or is too conservative and generates an inefficient utilization of resources.