A decision support system for multi-stakeholder exploration of the airship design space

Although there have been oscillations in airship interest since their use in the early 1900s, technological advancements and the need for more flexible and environmentally friendly transportation modes have caused a stream of study and surge in airship development in recent years. For companies and governments to understand how airships can be incorporated into their fleets to fulfill new or existing mission types, system design space exploration is an important step in understanding airships, their uses, and their design parameters. A decision support system (DSS), Design Exploration of Lighter-Than-Air Systems (DELTAS), was developed to help stakeholders with this task. DELTAS allows users to design airships and missions to determine how a design will perform in the scenario. As airships are sensitive to elevation and altitude, wind and terrain can also be studied to see how they may affect a mission scenario. Simulations can also be run for a given mission to find the Pareto-optimal designs for user-defined ranges of high-level airship design parameters. A case study is provided that demonstrates how DELTAS can be used to explore the airship design space for a specified mission. This case study shows how a design of experiments is important to more thoroughly cover the design space and to find and understand the relationships between airship design variables that lead to optimal mission times and costs.