Uncertainty-Based Design Optimization and Technology Evaluation: A Review

Abstract

Evaluation and assessment of novel technologies for aerospace applications is essential for business strategy and decision making regarding development efforts. Since technology is evaluated in the conceptual design phase and little is known about the technology, large uncertainty is present. This uncertainty needs to be accurately assessed and managed. To investigate the research efforts that have been performed to perform technology evaluation under uncertainty, a literature review was conducted, focusing on methods and modeling approaches to assign and quantify these uncertainties. It is found that probability theory is still the most popular theory for representing uncertainty. Polynomial Chaos Expansions and Stochastic Collocation methods are gaining popularity for propagating uncertainty through a modeling environment, but Monte Carlo Simulations are still widely used. Commonly, surrogate models are used to reduce computational effort. Other efforts focus on the use of multifidelity approaches to reduce computational effort when high-fidelity methods are required. Four issues that may need to be addressed in future research were identified.

Enhancement Opportunities for Conceptual Design in Aerospace Based on the Advanced Morphological Approach

“…The most used taxonomy to classify uncertainties comes from the field of risk assessment and considers two main types: aleatory and epistemic uncertainty [13,14]. Aleatory (also stochastic) uncertainty is defined as the inherent variation of a system or the environment.…”

Function‐Based Architecture Optimization: An Application to Hybrid‐Electric Propulsion Systems

“…Furthermore, the architecture design space can be extremely large due to a combinatorial explosion of alternatives (Iacobucci 2012). This lack of knowledge and the existence of a large design space often lead to reliance on expert judgement to support taking decisions, which might suffer from bias, subjectivity, conservatism or overconfidence (Roelofs & Vos 2018). To increase the level of certainty of the impact of architectural decisions on performance, and reduce reliance on expert judgement, it is necessary to employ physics-based systematic design space exploration techniques in search for novel architectures for hybrid electric propulsion systems .…”