Planning Technology Development Experimentation through Quantitative Uncertainty Analysis

摘要

Development activities are planned to gain new information about the technologies in question. As new information is gained, it is expected that the readiness will increase and the uncertainty surrounding the performance will be reduced. The linkage between technology readiness and performance uncertainty has been acknowledged in the literature and this research expands on the current state of the art by providing a methodology that synthesizes this information for experiment design planning. The methodology encompasses a new readiness communication tool that utilizes morphological analysis to decompose TRL into a set of attributes and choices. Furthermore, two new sensitivity analyses were created, the P-OAT analysis and the T-OAT analysis, to prioritize both technologies and individual technology impacts for experiment planning. The methodology was implemented on a use case motivated by the NASA Environmentally Responsible Aviation program and a physics-based aircraft performance model was utilized to provide the quantitative performance assessments. The results of the implementation demonstrated that it has the ability to recommend the type of experiment, what should be tested, and the type of measurements that are required to reduce uncertainty.