Investigating Uncertainty in Capability versus Cost Decision-Making

摘要

Decision-making within a technology research organization requires knowledge of forecasting technological possibilities, technology delivery schedule, customer driven requirements, and past performance history. The decision maker's intent is to maximize the impact of technology development to improve performance of existing applications or introduce new capabilities, within the constraints of resources available - funding, manpower, and time. The decision maker must often rely on deterministic valuations of future capabilities, which are sensitive to variability throughout the research and development process, and will impact costs for production, operation, and maintenance. Further, when considering technology development for an existing application, variability in that platform may alter the final results, potentially yielding much smaller improvements than originally projected. This effort outlines a methodology for developing a capability versus cost metric, application to a generic aerospace platform by selecting appropriate performance and cost parameters, and quantification of uncertainty within the methodology through variation of parameters by probabilistic distribution. Deterministic and non-deterministic results illustrate the intuitive result that there is a maximum efficiency for redesign, where increasing costs outpace increasing capability.