Industrial Application of a Multi-Disciplinary Design Optimization with Uncertainties to a Pair of Telecommunication Satellites

In satellite design, it is common practice to add safety margins to the constraints to achieve conservative solutions that are robust to uncertainties. This robustness often comes at the expense of performance and it may be more appropriate to include uncertainties in the definition of the design problem. This work addresses such a challenge by applying techniques of multidisciplinary design optimization under uncertainty to an industrial use case. The latter is a pair of telecommunication satellites launched together in a stacked configuration. Each satellite is a strongly coupled multidisciplinary system while the two satellites are not coupled at all. This use case can be extended to an arbitrary number of satellites. By considering uncertainty quantification techniques such as sensitivity analysis and reliability-based design optimization, this study demonstrates that accounting for uncertainties in the design problem results in a 66% reduction in performance loss compared to the adding of a predefined safety margins, while guaranteeing the feasibility of constraints with high probability.