In-space transportation infrastructure architecture decisions using a weighted graph approach

The selection of an architecture is a key step in complex system development and has major, often irreversible effects on the performance, cost, and flexibility of the system. In addition to being a process heavily influenced by the technical performance and cost analysis of each individual architecture, the selection of the initial architecture is also determined by less quantifiable criteria such as architecture flexibility and extensibility. In this paper we study methods to analyze initial architecture decisions influenced by these two factors using a fully enumerated tradespace of architectures for the in-space transportation infrastructure for human exploration of Mars. Our approach is to transform this tradespace into a weighted graph with nodes corresponding to architecture-technology combinations and edges corresponding to the ability to transition between two architectures. We restate the problem of selecting an initial architecture as two simple problems on this graph, finding that this approach can determine a small set of non-dominated options useful to the architecture selection process.