System of systems oriented flight vehicle conceptual design: Perspectives and progresses

In order to obtain optimized flight vehicle concepts which meet system of systems (SoS) operation requirements, designers have to pay high attention to the impact of SoS at conceptual design stage since operation environment goes increasingly complex. Based on this tendency, perspectives and progresses of SoS oriented flight vehicle conceptual design, which is abbreviate as SoSed design, are reviewed in this paper. Such basic concepts of SoS as definition, characteristics, differences between systems engineering and SoS engineering, as well as SoSed design process are introduced, then SoS engineering process model for research and development of flight vehicles and SoSed design wheel model for conceptual design are proposed. Related literature is classified and analyzed in accordance with four major elements including requirements, design concept, design analysis, and trade studies and optimization: typical SoS architectures, description and quantization of indexes are introduced; Application of inverse design in designing concept is analyzed; Modeling and simulation (M&S)-based methods and their applications in SoSed effectiveness evaluation are highlighted; According to SoSed trade studies and optimization related research, the importance of such points as decision-making and using multidisciplinary design optimization for reference are emphasized. Finally, the value of SoSed design is concluded, and five directions which are worthy of attention in this field are presented.