Complex engineered systems, such as those developed by NASA, are uniquely high-risk systems because they operate in extreme, variable, and unknown environments, comprise many interacting components…

This is a cooperative agreement awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Shared Services Center to Oregon State University, a public research university in Corvallis, Oregon. The contract, which does not have a set-aside designation, is focused on developing resilient design architectures for on-demand mobility (ODM) applications, such as autonomous air taxis. The research will enable designers to assess and trade-off the resilience of their design concepts with design and operational costs, using early design phase fault propagation models. The potential value of the contract is $124,813.72, and the period of performance is from September 15, 2018, to December 31, 2020. Oregon State University, as the prime contractor, has extensive experience providing research, engineering, and technical services to various U.S. federal agencies through contracts and grants, particularly in areas like materials science, oceanography, forestry, and renewable energy.

Complex engineered systems, such as those developed by NASA, are uniquely high-risk systems because they operate in extreme, variable, and unknown environments, comprise many interacting components with individual failure risks, and require high up-front research and development costs. A critical capability is assessing the resilience of design concept alternatives for such high-risk systems in the early design phase, or system architecture phase, before a large portion of the project budget is invested in a specific design concept. Resilience is broadly defined as the ability of a system to prepare for, absorb, recover from, and adapt to failure events. This research will specifically enable designers to assess and trade-off the resilience of their design concepts with design and operational costs using a resilience-informed utility scoring using our unique early design phase fault propagation models which will quantify the overall merit of a design. In our proposed research, we will focus upon resilience for on-demand mobility (ODM) applications, such as autonomous air taxis. We will investigate resilient design architectures with strategic use of system health monitoring can help minimize unscheduled maintenance and create fault tolerant systems to improve dispatch reliability rates while managing financial investment.