Assessing the Impact of Mission Requirements, Vehicle Attributes, Technologies and Uncertainty in Rotorcraft System Design

This research provides a probabilistic design environment for the propagation of design uncertainty to the system level to assist in making more educated decisions in the early stages of design. This design uncertainty is associated with the key elements that are addressed in system design and which are captured in the appropriate design environment, namely mission requirements, vehicle attributes and technologies. The proposed environments are constructed using a metamodeling technique called Response Surface Methodology (RSM) and provide a model relating system-level responses to the mission requirements, vehicle attributes and technologies. The Mission Space Model is concerned with mission requirements exclusively and provides the ability to model an infinite set of missions. The Unified Tradeoff Environment (UTE) integrates the mission requirements, vehicle attributes and technologies in a single environment while allowing both deterministic and probabilistic analyses. The design environments and design methods proposed in this research are demonstrated for a rotorcraft of current interest, namely the Future Transport Rotorcraft, and probabilistic applications are presented.