It’s All Rocket Science: On the Equivalence of Development Timelines for Aerospace and Nuclear Technologies

摘要

Early in the lifecycle of a system development, systems engineers must executetrade studies to allocate resources between different research and development efforts that aredeveloping technologies to be deployed into the system, and they must prepare riskmanagement plans for the selected technologies. We have been developing a statistical modelfor schedule and cost uncertainty based on a small number of inputs that are quite objectiveand are already integrated with technology readiness assessment. An algorithm thattransforms Technical Maturity (TM) scores from Department of Energy projects into aTechnology Readiness Level (TRL) score was created, allowing us to add data from a USDepartment of Energy to an existing set of data from NASA. We statistically tested whetherthe two samples (i.e. the DoE and NASA datasets) were randomly drawn from the samepopulation and concluded that the transition times for developing aerospace and nucleartechnologies are very similar.