Student Name: Angel Mario Zarate Villazon

Advisor: Dr. Dimitri Mavris

Milestone: PhD Thesis Proposal

Degree Program: Aerospace Engineering

Title: A Model-Based Methodology Supporting Commonality Integration in the Lunar Surface Mobility Vehicle Family

Abstract: The goal of the Artemis program is to establish a sustainable lunar settlement, which requires surface mobility vehicles capable of diverse, evolving missions. These use cases support exploration and infrastructure deployment activities. With challenges related to affordability and complexity, NASA has established commonality and interoperability, which relate to sharing common parts and ensuring diverse systems are compatible, as key design principles. Despite the widespread success of leveraging common vehicle platforms in the automotive and aerospace industries, current proposals for lunar surface vehicles remain largely treated as isolated systems rather than a cohesive family of systems where commonality can be leveraged. This fragmented approach overlooks the benefits that commonality can bring, such as reduced development costs and simplified lunar surface logistics and maintenance. However, transitioning to a family of systems perspective introduces complex tradeoffs between commonality and mission-specific performance, necessitating a methodology to identify where commonality should be integrated. To navigate this tradeoff, this research proposes a hybrid approach that leverages the analytical commonality and performance assessments of Product Family Design with the variability management frameworks from Product Line Engineering to support commonality integration decisions. The hybrid approach addresses three main phases of the decision-making process for commonality integration: Modeling of the variability of the lunar surface mobility family of vehicles across its operational, functional, and physical layers of abstraction in a feature model to elicit alternative designs through generative artificial intelligence. Linking simulation instances to the feature model to automatically generate physics-based constraints between these alternatives and ensure the feasibility of design alternatives. Evaluation of the commonality and performance tradeoff and the sensitivity of metric selection for the decision on integrating commonality across parts in different vehicles of the family. Overall, these contributions formulate a methodology that provides decision support on where it is appropriate to leverage commonality.  This research enables physics-driven decisions on a comprehensive description of the alternatives to decide commonality and interoperability. Ultimately, these results support the deployment of robust mobility capability across the lunar terrain through a family of vehicles that addresses the various needs for sustained human habitation on the lunar surface. 

Date and time: 2026-05-01, 9:30 am

Location: COVE (Weber Building)

Committee:
Dr. Dimitri Mavris (advisor), School of Aerospace Engineering
Prof. Daniel Schrage, School of Aerospace Engineering
Prof. Yashwanth Kumar Nakka, School of Aerospace Engineering
Dr. Michael Balchanos, School of Aerospace Engineering
Dr. Hugo Guillermo Chale Gongora, Airbus
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