Role for Interactive Tradespace Exploration in Multi-Stakeholder Negotiations

Abstract

The significant time, effort, and resource expenditures needed to design and develop aerospace systems motivate on-going research into developing methods for generating, evaluating, and selecting candidate system solutions that can deliver more benefit for a given cost. Compounding the problem is the multiplicity of perspectives of the many stakeholders for such systems, altering the meaning of “benefit” and “cost” depending on the stakeholder considered. Tradespace exploration techniques have been used in the past to generate large datasets in order to gain insights into design-value, cost-benefit tradeoffs for complex aerospace systems. Using interactive tradespace exploration to support multi-stakeholder negotiations can reveal these tradeoffs not only for individuals, but also across a group. A method is introduced and applied to two aerospace cases in order to explore the potential for interactive tradespace exploration to support stakeholder negotiations. Preliminary results indicate the method to be a rapid and beneficial technique, which generated compromise alternatives, guided the elicitation of previously unarticulated information, and resulted in increased confidence and solution buy-in of participating stakeholders.