Role for Interactive Tradespace Exploration in Multi- Stakeholder Negotiations

Abstract

The significant time, effort, and resource expenditures needed to design and develop aerospace systems motivate on-going research into developing methods for generating, evaluating, and selecting candidate system solutions that can deliver more benefit for a given cost. Compounding the problem is the multiplicity of perspectives of the many stakeholders for such systems, altering the meaning of "benefit" and "cost" depending on the stakeholder considered. Tradespace exploration techniques have been used in the past to generate large datasets in order to gain insights into design-value, cost-benefit tradeoffs for complex aerospace systems. Using interactive tradespace exploration to support multi-stakeholder negotiations can reveal these tradeoffs not only for individuals, but also across a group. A method is introduced and applied to two aerospace cases in order to explore the potential for interactive tradespace exploration to support stakeholder negotiations. Preliminary results indicate the method to be a rapid and beneficial technique, which generated compromise alternatives, guided the elicitation of previously unarticulated information, and resulted in increased confidence and solution buy-in of participating stakeholders.

Federated Space Systems’ Trade-Space Exploration for Strategic Robustness

“…Noting a dearth of quantitative methods for conceptual SoS design, a body of research establishes MATE as a method for discovering SoS or multi-stakeholder system designs (note that multi-stakeholder systems need not be an SoS but the cited works share a continuity of methodology) that trade the objectives of the constituent systems to find workable solutions for all [9,24,25]. These methodologies assume overlap in objectives between systems and higher-level goals or a degree of unified managerial authority that allows implementation of combined utility measures.…”

An Iterative Subsystem-Generated Approach to Populating a Satellite Constellation Tradespace

“…A set of attributes should be complete, non-redundant, operational, decomposable, minimal, and perceived independently. Satisfaction for performance at different levels of attributes can be assessed using single attribute utility functions that typically vary from 0 (minimally acceptable) to 1 (most desirable) 6 .…”

Revisiting the Tradespace Exploration Paradigm: Structuring the Exploration Process

“…The important application of supporting multiple stakeholder negotiations is explored in a separate paper. 21 Use of the procedures will be shown not only to quickly recreate the lessons of prior tradespace exploration work, but also to provide emergent knowledge not found in earlier ad-hoc explorations of tradespaces.…”