A Military Effectiveness Analysis and Decision Making Framework for Naval Ship Design and Acquisition

Abstract This paper describes research that develops a new framework for performing military effectiveness analyses and design tradeoff decisions. It provides an extensive survey of literature for effectiveness analysis and multi‐criteria decision making to develop a single consistent philosophy for such analyses. This philosophy is applied to a requirements and effectiveness analysis case study of a conventional submarine that is performed using response surface methods to facilitate design space visualization and decision maker interaction. Measures of merit are developed and applied to the case study. The resulting requirements space and methods to visualize and explore it in a decision making context are presented and discussed. Lastly, a framework is proposed that would facilitate the concurrent consideration of requirements and effectiveness analyses with design and technology forecasting to create a unified tradeoff environment that would provide decision makers with pertinent information to facilitate better informed requirements derivation and design selection.