An Integrated Approach to Military Aircraft Selection and Concept Evaluation

The design (or evaluation) of military aircraft, by nature, is a process consisting of conflicting goals and objectives at the conceptual, preliminary, and detailed level. Affordability, mission capability, availability (operational readiness), wartime survivability, and peacetime safety are five of the main attributes required of modern weapon systems. Traditional approaches for system evaluation or optimization have focused on one, perhaps two, of these attributes in isolation. At Georgia Tech's Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL), a methodology has been developed which takes account of the combined effect of each of the "-ilities" plus safety in providing a means to evaluate alternative designs. The centerpiece of this approach is the Overall Evaluation Criterion (OEC). The OEC is an equation consisting of five metrics; one for each of the attributes. These five terms are pre-multiplied by so-called attribute importance coefficients which represent the ability to tailor the OEC to the evaluator's preferences. The purpose of this paper is to detail the form of this OEC, describe the appropriate metrics for each of the five attributes which make up the criterion, illustrate an algorithm for their concurrent calculation, and conclude by suggesting a novel way of quantifying an evaluation by accounting for the "voice of the customer".