Design Engineering Assistant for the Early Design of Space Missions – ICE Lab

Summary: Space missions development takes years and traditionally starts with a feasibility study phase where experts consider several design options, trade-offs and eventually take decisions that will impact the rest of the mission life cycle. To make these first design decisions, experts rely both on their implicit knowledge (i.e. The former type of knowledge represents a substantial amount of unstructured data, which is today underutilized and too time-consuming to explore during the limited timeframe of a feasibility study. A solution is to design an Expert System (ES) to support the initial study input estimation, assist experts by answering queries related to previous design decisions or push them to explore new design options. Such an effort is led since January 2018 by two PhD students, Audrey Berquand and Francesco Murdaca, at the University of Strathclyde within the Intelligent Computational Engineering (ICE) lab, under the supervision of Dr. Annalisa Riccardi.