Value-driven design is being developed by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, through a program committee of government, industry and academic representatives.
[1] In parallel, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has promulgated an identical strategy, calling it value-centric design, on the F6 Program.
This is also similar to the value-driven approach of agile software development where a project's stakeholders prioritise their high-level needs (or system features) based on the perceived business value each would deliver.
[3] However, value-driven design supporters claim that it can improve the development of large aerospace systems by reducing or eliminating cost overruns[4] which are a major problem, according to independent auditors.
[9] Whereas in Multi-Attribute Utility Theory, an objective function is constructed from stakeholder assessments,[10] value-driven design employs economic analysis to build a value model.
[13] Simon played both sides, saying that, ideally, engineered systems should be optimized according to an objective function, but realistically this is often too hard, so that attributes would need to be satisficed, which amounted to setting performance requirements.
George Hazelrigg put engineering design, business plan analysis, and decision theory together for the first time in a framework in a paper written in 1995, which was published in 1998.