Technical Paper
A Generic Trade Study Methodology for the System Analysis of Regenerative Life Support Systems
1991-07-01
911320
A generic engineering trade study methodology has been developed to provide an effective framework for the system analysis of regenerative live support systems. The performance of engineering tradeoffs is a key technique in a rigorous system engineering process that is being used to develop advanced regenerative life support technology at NASA Ames Research Center. The trade study methodology consists of the following steps: 1) deriving relevant life support system functional requirements from a given space exploration mission scenario of interest; 2) developing a tradeoff decision methodology consisting of a set of evaluation criteria and corresponding weighting functions grouped into a relational hierarchy; 3) synthesizing a set of design options to be evaluated during the study; 4) modeling and analyzing each design option to generate data to input to a quantitative scoring scheme; and 5) evaluating each design option using the information developed in the preceding steps.