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Increasing system complexity has provided the impetus to develop new and novel systems engineering methodologies. One of these methodologies is set‐based design (SBD), a concurrent design methodology well suited for complex systems subject to significant uncertainty. Since the 1990s, numerous private, public, and defense sector design programs have successfully implemented SBD. However, concerns regarding SBD's complexity, tendency toward qualitative methods, and lack of quantitative tools have limited its use. To address these issues, our research surveys 122 refereed journal articles and conference papers to assess SBD's state‐of‐practice and identify relevant research opportunities. To accomplish these tasks, we perform a structured literature review to identify and assess relevant and influential research. We found that SBD's state‐of‐practice relies heavily upon decision and tradespace analysis with increasing emphasis on uncertainty modeling and MBSE. We found that the majority of SBD research consists of quantitative methodologies focusing on component and small system applications. We also found that complex system applications used mostly qualitative methodologies. We identify SBD research opportunities for requirements development, MBSE, uncertainty modeling, multiresolution modeling, adversarial analysis, and program management. Finally, we recommend the development of a comprehensive SBD methodology and toolkit, suited for complex system design across all stages of the product development life cycle.

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Adequately exploring the tradespace in the early system design phase is important to determine the best design concepts to pursue in the next life cycle stage. Tradespace exploration (TSE) often uses trade-off analysis. Set-based design (SBD) methods, compared to traditional point-based design, explore significantly more designs. An integrated framework with model-based system engineering (MBSE) and a life cycle cost model enables design evaluation in near real-time. This study proposes an early design phase SBD methodology and demonstrates how SBD enabled by an integrated framework with MBSE and life cycle cost provides an enhanced TSE that can inform system design requirements and help decision makers select high performing designs at an affordable cost. Specifically, this paper (1) provides an overview of TSE and SBD, (2) describes the Integrated Trade-off Analysis Framework, (3) describes a methodology to implement SBD in the early design phase, and (4) demonstrates the techniques using an unmanned aerial vehicle case study. We found that the Integrated Trade-off Analysis Framework informs requirement development based upon how the requirements affect the feasible tradespace. Additionally, the integrated framework that uses SBD better explores the design space compared to traditional methods by finding a larger set of feasible designs early in the design process.

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