Difficult Decisions Made Easier

About this technology

Overview

GoldSim Technology Group LLC, of Issaquah, Washington, a privately held software company that delivers software and services to help people understand complex systems and make better decisions worked with NASA to advance GoldSim, the company's namesake simulation software, originally developed for long-term safety analyses of nuclear waste disposal, and currently used by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, among others. The company worked with NASA through a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop and demonstrate a new module for the GoldSim software: an integrated, total-system risk and reliability analysis approach based on dynamic, probabilistic simulation. This new module (the Reliability Module) added features to the software to facilitate simulation of space missions. The new module now provides a valuable new systems analysis capability to complement current NASA systems analysis approaches. In particular, it is useful for impact studies, risk/cost/benefit analyses, risk/uncertainty analyses, model integration, and model-based design/model-based engineering. The development of the new module marked the successful completion of the NASA-funded research project to demonstrate the suitability of the GoldSim software for evaluating the risk and reliability of future NASA missions. The company released the new module to the public in September 2005.