STABILITY ANALYSIS: AN APPROACH TO THE EVALUATION OF SYSTEM DESIGN

The performance of most modern day, large-scale systems is defined in terms of their degree of achievement for various measures of effectiveness (e.g., cost, power output, environmental impact, etc.). These measures, in turn, are often derived from multiple, conflicting, and (usually) nonlinear functions which serve to reflect the system's design specifications. Considerable effort has been devoted to the development of various design tools, both conventional (i.e., single objective models) and multiobjective (e.g., utility theory, goal programming), but far less attention seems to have been paid to the development of a practical methodology for system sensitivity analysis. Unfortunately, in real world problems, the sensitivity of the system with respect to variations in system parameters may be as important, or more so, than just the determination of the static, "optimal" design. In this paper we deal with this aspect of system design and demonstrate our proposed approach via actual implementation to the specific design problem associated with beam pattern forming in phased antenna arrays.