System Design Under Uncertain Time-Varying Requirements: Nuclear Weapons Case Study
Open AccessMany military systems like ships, planes, and missiles have service lifetimes measured in decades. As their costs rise and numbers shrink, it is essential that they remain useful over that timeframe as well. Complicating this, the utility of such systems is contingent upon the choices made by potential adversaries, which are beyond the control of system designers. This points towards the possibility that the demands made upon them, and hence their requirements, may change more rapidly than they can adapt or be replaced. This is an especially consequential issue for two strategic nuclear weapons systems, the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) and the Ballistic Missile Submarine (SSBN), which are the subjects of this praxis. Defense acquisition currently has no process with which to account for uncertainty of this type over spans of time this long. This praxis presents an approach to quantitatively address system design where requirements are directly coupled to uncertain, exogenous factors. Acquisition of ICBMs and SSBNs is modeled with an inventory management construct, where the challenge is to deliver requisite capability in sufficient quantity at the appropriate time. Robust optimization techniques are used to generate solutions for different design variants that are evaluated for their Pareto optimality under a range of potential adversary-choice scenarios or ‘futures’. The praxis demonstrated that system engineering parameters can be evaluated under severe uncertainty with robust optimization. Results from this type of analysis can inform major system design decisions, especially when performed in the early stages of the acquisition process. The broad implication of this work is that future uncertainty can be quantitatively accommodated within systems design processes in a manner that does not incur the risks of using stochastic forecasts beyond their practical limits. It also demonstrates that the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense can make better use of existing information for long range planning and analysis.
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