Decision & risk based design structures; decision support needs for conceptual, concurrent design

In this paper, we elaborate on the decision support needs during conceptual, concurrent design. For this purpose, we consider the type of decision aids that might be helpful to the designers during design, and the information needed by the applications of the products of the design that could be captured and structured by these decision aid tools and processes. We explain our current thoughts and recommendations with respect to the research challenges in this area based on our experience with conceptual, concurrent design teams, as well as our synthesis of the first NASA sponsored workshop on "Decision Based Design Structures" that was held on October 6, 7, & 8^th 2004 to address some of the same issues. The design context under consideration is space missions.