DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTS FOR AIR LAUNCHED EFFECTS UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES

Abstract

America needs to rapidly inject advanced technology into its Armed Forces to put pressure on near-peer adversaries in great power competition. In one such effort, the United States Army is working to quickly and efficiently develop a system involving two vehicles, the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft with Air-Launched Effects. This family of vehicles will be critical to establishing dominance in multi-domain operations on the battlefield. These vehicles are in a rapid prototyping initiative with no established Analysis of Alternatives. In order for the program to stay on an ambitious deliverable timeline, a set of low-detailed simulations for these vehicles in the Joint Dynamic Allocation of Fires and Sensors modeling environment are created with a design of experiments to provide narrowed criteria and required performance characteristics for the two vehicles. This data will feed a higher-fidelity model in the Advanced Warfighting Simulation (AWARS) environment. This research will reduce the delivery time of the project by enabling AWARS modelers to focus on a smaller subset of characteristic attributes. This thesis provides the Research and Analysis Center with a Pareto optimal frontier for the vehicles’ characteristics, explores characteristic tradeoffs, and determines measures of effectiveness and measures of performance for policymakers and program managers.