Uncertainty modeling in autonomous robust spacecraft system design

In the last few years, much research has been dedicated to the development of decisions support systems for the space system engineers or even of completely automated design methods capturing the reasoning of the system experts. However, the problem of taking into account the uncertainties of the variables and models to determine an optimal and robust spacecraft design has not been tackled effectively yet. Based on the clouds formalism we propose a novel approach to process the uncertainty information provided by expert designers and incorporate it into the automated search for a robust optimal design. (© 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)