Feasibility detection for nested codesign of hypersonic vehicles

Controllability and feasiblity measures are used to determine whether a given system can achieve its specified objective. However, for nonlinear systems with state constraints, the controllable and feasible sets may be highly sensitive to minor perturbations in the system's constraints, initial states and parameters. This becomes particularly important in codesign of hypersonic vehicles, where functions governing the dynamics must be estimated from expensive computational fluid dynamics simulations, and poor initialization can lead to significant waste of resources. By relaxation of the constraints and introduction of a surrogate cost, we provide a method for detecting and quantifying which constraints are violated. To demonstrate the method in a concrete example, we apply the technique to simulation of hypersonic vehicle trajectories.