Preference Modeling for Government-Owned Large-Scale Complex Engineered Systems: A Satellite Case Study

The design of large-scale complex engineered systems (LSCES) has been shown to be a distributed decision-making problem involving hundreds or thousands of designers making decisions at different levels of an organizational hierarchy. Traditional systems engineering (SE) approaches use requirements to communicate the preference(s) of stakeholders to drive the decisions of the designers. Requirements, which act as proxies for actual preferences, only state what is not desired of the system rather than what is wanted. This leads to a lack of consistency in the communication of preferences across the subsystems (and even organizations) involved. Also, the current requirements-based SE approaches do not offer any system-level guidance in choosing the best among feasible design alternatives, where all the designs that satisfy requirements are treated equally. Value-driven design (VDD), an alternative SE approach, offers a new perspective on complex system design and emphasizes the importance of capturing true preferences of stakeholders using a meaningful decomposable value function. The formulation of an all-encompassing value function has been proven to be a very tedious process involving a huge overhead, as it requires understanding of the inherent design trades in the system. Past researchers have focused in detail on formulating value functions for commercial endeavors. The primary focus of this paper is to investigate how the formulation of value functions can be approached in a methodical manner using a data-based approach, specifically for a government-based agency (e.g., NASA). More specifically, this paper focuses on formulating a value function for a space telescope mission by identifying and analyzing different aspects involved in capturing preferences.