Statistical experimentation for affordable concurrent design

Good analyses is foundational to good design - particularly concurrent design involving multiple disciplines. Foundalional to concurrent design is concurrent analysis. One approach to achieve affordable concurrent analysis is through simulation. Typically, simulation is used in the later stages of design. In this paper we describe an affordable method for designing in the conceptual stage using relatively high fidelity analysis. Our method is rooted in three domains, namely, the Design of Experiments, the Response Surface Methodology and the compromise Decision Support Problem. The High Speed Civil Transport aircraft design is used as an example to illustrate the potential of our approach.