Research topics in trade space exploration

Abstract

This paper presents a number of new, open research topics in design methods emerging from our use of an internally developed method for supporting trade space exploration for complex systems, to include spacecraft. The research topics focus on how the trade space exploration process affects how models are assembled and exercised, how features in the trade space can be traced back to their source in the models, and on how the process of increasing refinement in modeling is itself a tropic of research