Scope vs. detail: the teams of the Concept Design Center

The Aerospace Corporation developed the Concept Design Center (CDC) to better support its customers through more efficient and effective application of conceptual design capabilities and expertise throughout the corporation. Members of the CDC meet as a group on an as-needed basis in a design facility to create and evaluate conceptual space system designs. This is done in a synergistic and collaborative manner which leads to a better product, produced in less time, for lower cost than was previously possible. A number of teams have been created that focus on different aspects of the conceptual design problem. Each team has developed tools and processes that allow for the conceptual design of an architecture or system at an appropriate level of detail. This provides insight and understanding of the technical issues involved from multi-disciplinary perspective. The five CDC teams at The Aerospace Corporation provide capabilities that range from system-of-systems architecture analysis, by the Mission Architecture Team, to the design of sensor components by the Electro-Optical Payload Team. This paper focuses on the processes and techniques used by the different CDC teams, and the manner in which each structures and executes a study