A SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS OF IPOWER: A SMALL UNIT ENERGY AND MISSION PLANNING TOOL

Abstract

The USMC Expeditionary Energy Office is funding the partial development of the Intelligent Power Optimization with Environmental Reactivity (IPOWER) simulation model to provide a tool to commanders and program managers for making energy-informed decisions. IPOWER allows leaders to predict power requirements for dismounted units and assess how equipment parameters affect power consumption. To facilitate testing and analysis with IPOWER, a software wrapper was built that enables users to automatically run efficient experiments. Using this capability, over 4,000 simulated missions were implemented across multiple input variables and applied to four scenarios that varied mission timeline (24- and 72-hour) and use of harvesters (solar panels). The results indicate that IPOWER produces intuitive results when harvesters are excluded. As duty cycle and average power increase, the total power consumed, total weight, and total number of batteries also increases. However, the inclusion of harvesters into scenarios highlights possible system-level interactions that are more complex to simulate. During scenarios where harvesters are used, power harvested does not always result in power being recharged to batteries. When mission length was extended to 72 hours, errors emerged and data anomalies resulted. In general, we show that IPOWER can be used for its intended purpose, but additional efforts are needed to simulate complexity when adding harvesters to scenarios.