Design-To-Cost Decision Support System (DTC-DSS)

This paper presents a spreadsheet-resident, non-linear programming-based approach for analyzing design-to-cost (DTC) trade-offs supporting early-phase system design investigations and decisions. Military and commercial systems' design broadly concerns designing hardware, software, production, operations and support. However, early distinct segments of hardware design decision processes may focus exclusively on cost versus hardware design trade-offs, while temporarily abstracting from broader though essential considerations. In this paper, a DTC decision support system (DSS) is developed and demonstrated based on using information reflecting an integrated collection of earth orbiting satellite hardware systems. Later discussion shows that successfully using the DTC-DSS hinges on the quality of the underlying knowledge base, driven by collecting and relating relevant, compatible, and reliable cost and corresponding hardware design data at an acceptable level of fidelity.