Evaluating 50,000 Aerial Drones Against Volatile Targets

Abstract

After developing draft requirements, systems engineering generates and evaluates potential designs concepts against these requirements. After a concept is selected, multiple more detailed variations of that selected concept are generated. The best variation is selected for implementation. Thus the value of each design concept is only an estimate of the ultimate value of what is ultimately designed. This process is complicated by volatile and interdependent requirements. This paper derives a evaluation function for these kinds of problems and applies it to the setbased design of 50, 000 small unmanned aerial vehicles concepts generated by set‐based design.