A System Engineering Tool for the Design of Satellite Subsystems

The conceptual design of a satellite system is a very challenging and crucial engineering problem. The authors have investigated empirical and analogy models for the conceptual design of the subsystems of a satellite developing a multidisciplinary design process that has been implemented into a software SEM, acronym for System Engineering Module. Module because SEM will be incorporated in a more general astrodynamics software developed by ESA; the name of this software is STA, Space Trajectory Analysis. SEM enhances the quality of the design by guiding and advising the user through the process. This paper discusses the fundamental aspects related to the multidisciplinary design process and to the software developed to implement it. The input/output classification and the identified information flow among the subsystems’ models pave the way for further development in the direction of automated optimization techniques that could easily be implemented in SEM.