System Architecture: Strategy and Product Development for Complex Systems, First Edition

15.5 Sensitivity Analysis

At the conclusion of any analysis—here, our tradespace analysis—it is important to ask how sensitive the results are to modeling and human input assumptions. This would be near the end of what Simon called the “Design Activity.” Answering this question in a systematic fashion is often more resource-consuming than solving the problem in the first place, but it is an essential part of the process.

A posteriori sensitivity analyses typically involve re-running a model under many different scenarios, where each scenario contains a different set of modeling assumptions. For instance, all the GNC tradespaces that we showed in this chapter were generated assuming that the mass of connections between elements is zero. If we ...