Decision Analysis Applied to Small Satellite Risk Management

Risk management plans improve the likelihood of mission success by identifying potential failures early and planning mitigation methods to circumvent any issues. However, in the aerospace industry to date, risk management plans have typically only been used for larger and more expensive satellites, and have rarely been applied to lower cost satellites such as CubeSats. Furthermore, existing risk management plans typically require experienced personnel and significant time to run the analysis. The CubeSat Decision Advisor tool uses components of decision theory such as decision trees, multi-attribute utility theory, and utility elicitation methods to determine the expected utility of a mitigation technique alternative. Based on the user’s value preference system, assessment of success probabilities, and resources required for a given mitigation technique, the tool suggests the course of action which will normatively yield the most value for the cost, people, and time resources required. This research creates a risk management software tool never before available, and yet easily accessible and usable, for low cost small satellite missions. The target audience is primarily university labs, who could not otherwise afford expensive software packages. However, the interested parties now also include government, corporate, and international missions.