Conceptual System Design Case Study for Decision Analysis

As part of organizations pursuing innovation, systems engineering teams include experts in decision-driven data generation, analysis, and synthesis. These experts provide skill in crafting decision support models that show the relationship between decision alternatives and fundamental objectives. These decision support models are key tools that provide context and traceability to all other steps of the systems engineering process. Review of the systems engineering and decision analysis literature suggests that a wide variety of decision methods are employed during an organization’s innovation process, but there is limited ability to compare the relative strengths and weaknesses of these alternative methods. To expand existing literature, this paper develops a case study that can be used as a template to employ various decision methods, stimulate focused academic debate, identify best practices, and highlight common pitfalls. The case study presents a hypothetical request for proposal-eliciting concepts for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems designed to conduct search and rescue (SAR) operations. The case study elaborates the elements of the UAV SAR elicitation to develop a non-trivial problem statement that possesses elements of story, organizational context, and competitor systems. The paper employs set-based design principles to progressively recommend sets of viable designs and progress through a decision analysis process to identify a solution that provides a competitive advantage over competitor systems. To integrate with existing literature, the paper utilizes the Decision Analysis Data Model (DADM) developed by the Decision Analysis Working Group (DAWG) of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) as a reference model.