Making decisions about the structure of a future military fleet is a
challenging task. Several issues need to be considered such as the existence of
multiple competing objectives and the complexity of the operating environment.
A particular challenge is posed by the various types of uncertainty that the
future might hold. It is uncertain what future events might be encountered; how
fleet design decisions will influence and shape the future; and how present and
future decision makers will act based on available information, their personal
biases regarding the importance of different objectives, and their economic
preferences. In order to assist strategic decision-making, an analysis of
future fleet options needs to account for conditions in which these different
classes of uncertainty are exposed. It is important to understand what
assumptions a particular fleet is robust to, what the fleet can readily adapt
to, and what conditions present clear risks to the fleet. We call this the
analysis of a fleet's strategic positioning. This paper introduces how
strategic positioning can be evaluated using computer simulations. Our main aim
is to introduce a framework for capturing information that can be useful to a
decision maker and for defining the concepts of robustness and adaptiveness in
the context of future fleet design. We demonstrate our conceptual framework
using simulation studies of an air transportation fleet. We capture uncertainty
by employing an explorative scenario-based approach. Each scenario represents a
sampling of different future conditions, different model assumptions, and
different economic preferences. Proposed changes to a fleet are then analysed
based on their influence on the fleet's robustness, adaptiveness, and risk to
different scenarios
