| Defense contractors face increasing pressure to improve the quality of new products while at the same time cutting engineering costs and reducing product lead-time. On one hand, the government mandates that new innovative military complex systems must be defined, created and deployed faster than ever before. At the same time, the government demands that these complex systems must exhibit extremely high levels of reliability, durability, agility, and efficiency. This situation has put a stronger focus on the product development process. To effectively address these issues in product design, this proposal research presents innovative and methodical approach that integrates a sophisticated design exploration tools in the early stage of the engineering product design life cycle to optimize the performance characteristics subject to system constraints by searching the design space to efficiently determine the best design variables from among all possibilities without explicitly evaluating each possibility. Foundation to the proposed approach is the use of the Design of Experiments (DOE) techniques to identify the critical parameters of the design, the use of approximation methodology for improving computational efficiency in designing complex systems, the use of optimization techniques to identify the best optimal design, and finally, the use of quality engineering methods for improving the quality of a product that is sensitive to potential noise and variation of design parameters. This approach is strongly supported by General Dynamic Land Systems (GDLS) senior executives, who believe that innovation in product development is a key to the company's long-term potential in the defense market.;To demonstrate the ease, speed, efficiency, and cost savings of this methodical design approach, a case study is considered involving the evaluation of the ride performances of the Future Combat System (FCS), Manned Ground Vehicle (MGV), using Two Dimensional Vehicle Dynamic Simulation codes, referred to as VEHDYN. |
