The proposed research will offer a new approach for multidisciplinary optimization that does not exist in any form in any of the current commercial or open source codes. It will offer a new capability to NASA Programs for conducting optimizations while accounting for uncertainty quantification associated with the credibility of models and simulations. Subject matter experts will be able to identify the credibility of each simulation which is used in the optimization by grading each one of the eight credibility factors prescribed in NASA-STD-7009. Decision makers will be able to provide their input in linguistic format on how to interpret the credibility scores when making design decisions. At that point it will also be possible to consider how critical each decision is to the success of a mission. Therefore, the end product will be of great value to all NASA Programs and to the aerospace community.
The new developments will be promoted to the shipbuilding, automotive, aircraft, space, and the military ground vehicle sectors. The common factors among these industries are: (i) all use multi-physics simulation models for assessing the performance of their products during design (ii) models of variable fidelity are used in the decision making process (iii) credibility of simulation results can only be considered by the decision makers and not by any automated multidisciplinary optimization process (iv) they all have needs for optimizing their designs while balancing performance in many conflicting disciplines (v) they all have needs for designing products based on economic viability and making the complex design optimization process easy to use Thus there is a significant commercial potential for the technology which will be developed by the proposed research.
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