Tradespace exploration in the Cloud : incorporating cloud technologies into IVTea Suite

Abstract

IVTea Suite is a tradespace exploration and analysis tool designed to allow users to gain insights into potential designs for large scale systems, and enables the analysis of tradeoffs, both static and dynamic, inherent in the selection of particular designs from amongst many possibilities. IVTea Suite's current architecture limits its ability to operate on large datasets, as well as prevents it from calculating important computationally complex lifecycle metrics needed to select value sustaining designs. This thesis analyses the current state of cloud technologies and provides solutions on how IVTea Suite can overcome its current architectural limitations. As a demonstration of potential new capabilities, the multi-era affordability with change paths problem, previously not solvable, is addressed using Markov decision processes and cloud technology. Additionally, this work describes a cloud framework that can be used in the future, which provides the potential ability to solve the multi-arc change paths problem for datasets previously too large to evaluate.