Student Name: Kader Engin Aydin

Advisor: Dr. Dimitri Mavris

Milestone: PhD Thesis Proposal

Degree Program: Aerospace Engineering

Title: An MBSE Framework for Certification Informed Design Decisions

Abstract: Aircraft continue to undergo design changes throughout their service life to accommodate new technologies, operational needs, and customer requirements. These modifications can affect systems beyond those directly changed and require previous compliance demonstrations to be reconsidered. The resulting certification work can influence whether a proposed modification is worthwhile and which alternative should be selected. However, the information needed to assess these consequences is often distributed across design documents, certification records, and engineering disciplines. Establishing the relationships between a modification, its effects on the aircraft, and the associated compliance work therefore requires substantial interpretation and coordination. Engineering change management methods provide ways to represent dependencies and identify how changes propagate through a system. Some methods also relate these effects to engineering effort through component costs, task dependencies, and repeated work. Model-based certification studies address another part of the problem by connecting regulations to aircraft characteristics and verification activities. Although these approaches support individual assessments, they do not consistently connect aircraft design changes with the certification requirements and demonstrations they affect. Classification also depends on interpreting quantitative and qualitative criteria using information about the change. A further need is to relate the identified certification consequences to the work required, so that modifications can be compared during early design. This proposal presents three investigations toward a model-based methodology for assessing aircraft design changes and their certification consequences. The first investigates how aircraft structure, functions, system interactions, and certification artifacts can be connected to identify and trace change effects. The proposed approach uses conditional relationships to represent the applicability of requirements and compliance activities across aircraft configurations. The second investigates how regulatory classification criteria can be expressed as evaluable conditions and connected to the design characteristics and affected areas represented in the model. The aim is to derive classification inputs from the modeled change rather than require users to answer each classification question. The third investigates how the type, scope, and dependencies of the associated compliance activities can be combined into a relative certification-effort measure. Recorded certification project durations provide an empirical reference for developing and evaluating this measure. The proposed methodology will be examined through representative aircraft modifications, drawing on regulatory guidance, aircraft-family configurations, and documented supplemental type certificate projects. These applications will assess whether a connected model can identify certification impacts, produce traceable classification decisions, and distinguish the relative effort of different modifications. Together, the investigations aim to provide a reusable approach for considering certification consequences alongside the technical benefits of a design change, supporting the comparison of alternatives before detailed certification planning is complete. 

Date and time: 2026-11-17, 10 am - 1 pm

Location: Collaborative Visualization Environment (CoVE) Weber SST II

Committee:
Dr. Dimitri Mavris (advisor), School of Aerospace Engineering
Dr. Daniel P. Schrage, School of Aerospace Engineering
Dr. Kai A. James, School of Aerospace Engineering
Dr. Elena Garcia, School of Aerospace Engineering
Dr. Angela Campbell, FAA