On Composable and Parametric Uncertainty in Systems Co-Design

Abstract

Optimizing the design of complex systems requires navigating interdependent decisions, heterogeneous components, and multiple objectives. Our monotone theory of co-design offers a compositional framework for addressing this challenge, modeling systems as Design Problems (DPs), representing trade-offs between functionalities and resources within partially ordered sets. While current approaches model uncertainty using intervals, capturing worst- and best-case bounds, they fail to express probabilistic notions such as risk and confidence. These limitations hinder the applicability of co-design in domains where uncertainty plays a critical role. In this paper, we introduce a unified framework for composable uncertainty in co-design, capturing intervals, distributions, and parametrized models. This extension enables reasoning about risk-performance trade-offs and supports advanced queries such as experiment design, learning, and multi-stage decision making. We demonstrate the expressiveness and utility of the framework via a numerical case study on the uncertainty-aware co-design of task-driven Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).