An Optimization Model for Ballistic Missile Flight Test Design Under Variable Size Constraints
Open Access DepositedBallistic missiles, especially in the intercontinental range, present a unique challenge in the program management tradeoff of cost, schedule, and performance. These complex systems are of the highest national importance, and thus the fullest understanding of the capability of these systems requires rigorous testing as a national priority. At the same time, testing of these complex systems is expensive, consuming limited national resources. While ballistic missile technology is not new, the generational gap in the development of modern strategic systems has left the industry with outdated practices in the planning of flight test campaigns. Rather than continue with the manual planning methods of the mid-20th century, applying modern computational methods presents an opportunity for improved efficiency and cost savings. This is especially relevant as all of these legacy systems are slated for upgrade or replacement within the current decade and defense procurement budgets are increasingly scrutinized. This praxis presents a method to apply heuristic optimization techniques, based on the analogous problem of constrained sports scheduling, as a decision support tool to quantitatively plan a ballistic missile flight test campaign. The attributes for both developmental and operational test considerations are mathematically modeled and solved as a non-linear, mixed integer problem using the latest commercially available branch-and-cut optimization engine. The results of this study establish that the optimization framework is effective at exploring the flight test campaign design trade space and producing a flight test matrix that accomplishes test objectives at lower cost than legacy manual methods. Applying this optimization framework, with its assumptions, to the previous generation of ballistic missile resulted in a modeled 6% cost reduction, totaling over $125M in projected savings.
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Nickelsberg_gwu_0075A_17638.pdf | 2025-12-12 | Open Access |
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