Pathfinding's Evolving Role In Military And Defense Technology

By Bill Martin

A pathfinding methodology can open up design options that otherwise may not have been considered due to time and manpower restraints.

Before we delve deeper, it is best to establish the definition of pathfinding (PF) as it is interpreted in this article:

PF is a methodology to help explore alternative implementations to optimize mechanical, thermal, and electrical solutions. PF can be applied to any type of product — integrated circuit (IC), printed circuit board, aircraft, rocket, bridge, ship, etc. PF’s key benefit is identification of the best solution from many possibilities.

In many cases, PF is limited by the tools’ algorithms, along with required resources using suboptimal PF tools. These limitations may not allow an optimum solution. A successful PF tool minimizes resource use and time needed to create structures while maintaining high accuracy with short simulation times, accelerating every aspect of PF. A secondary benefit of PF methodology is that, when an optimum solution is chosen, the PF analysis can shift to a process’s tolerances to determine or improve the solution’s robustness. Some might label this systematic method design of experiments (DoE).