Presented at the 1999 NSF Grantees Conference, Long Beach, CA, January 1999.The focus of the work being conducted under this grant is to create a virtual stochastic l environment that will enable designers to make decisions in the presence of uncertainty while considering all aspects relevant to the design at the earliest possible time. This paper describes a portion of this research involving the application of a probabilistic method which allows designers to make direct trades between probability of meeting design goals and product performance (such as specific fuel consumption). The example described here is focused on the cycle selection for a notional commercial aircraft engine such that the design merit can be quantified in terms of a probability of meeting a design target. Ultimately, this research will be extended to include environmental aspects such as acoustic noise and emissions requirements
