PAGE CONTENTS
Objectives
The objective of the project is to assess and demonstrate a resilience‑by‑design approach for the system‑level design of future satellite communication systems and services. The activity focuses on identifying innovative architectural concepts, operational strategies, and mitigation measures that improve service continuity under multiple, evolving, and combined threat scenarios.
To achieve this, the project establishes a structured and quantitative framework to analyse threats, risks, and their impacts across space, ground, and user segments. The framework enables objective evaluation of the effectiveness, cost, and system‑level implications of resilience measures through the definition of measurable resilience metrics and key performance indicators, supporting transparent trade‑offs between resilience, performance, and cost.
A central objective is the development and validation of a first optimisation model prototype enabling multidimensional trade‑space exploration for resilient satcom system design. In parallel, the project identifies technological gaps and defines development roadmaps for both optimisation tools and enabling resilience technologies, supporting their progressive maturation and future operational exploitation in institutional and commercial contexts.
Benefits
The proposed product provides added value by addressing satcom resilience at system level through an integrated, quantitative resilience‑by‑design framework. Existing solutions typically focus on isolated aspects such as risk identification, cybersecurity assessment, or performance optimisation, often treated independently and through largely qualitative or static approaches. In contrast, the product connects threats, mitigation measures, system architecture choices, cost, and performance within a single coherent optimisation environment.
Its value lies in enabling multidimensional trade‑space exploration that captures non‑linear and complex interactions across space, ground, and user segments, supporting informed decision‑making during early design phases where architectural choices are most impactful. The framework introduces measurable resilience metrics and traceable links between design variables and system‑level outcomes, improving transparency and repeatability of design decisions.
The modular and extensible architecture supports heterogeneous multi‑orbit and multi‑system scenarios and allows progressive integration of new risk models, mitigation technologies, and optimisation methods. This flexibility makes the product adaptable to evolving operational contexts and emerging threats, while providing a scalable foundation for future institutional and commercial satcom system design and validation activities.
Features
The product provides an integrated resilience‑by‑design optimisation environment supporting early‑phase and system‑level design of satellite communications architectures. It combines system engineering principles with quantitative risk and optimisation methods to enable informed, traceable, and robust design decisions under complex threat conditions.
Key capabilities and components include:
- A modular system modelling framework representing configurable satcom architectures across space, ground, and user segments, supporting multi‑orbit, multi‑system, and multi‑domain scenarios.
- A formalised threat and risk modelling layer addressing heterogeneous threat categories, likelihoods, and impact mechanisms relevant to satcom services.
- Mitigation strategies implemented as explicit design variables, enabling consistent assessment of technical characteristics, cost, maturity, and effectiveness against defined system KPIs.
- A quantitative resilience assessment framework ensuring traceability between threats, mitigations, architectural choices, and system‑level performance outcomes.
- A multi‑objective optimisation engine supporting multidimensional trade‑space exploration across non‑linear and non‑convex design spaces.
- Supporting analysis tools, including scenario management, optimisation benchmarking, and data visualisation for decision support.
A scalable and extensible architecture, enabling progressive integration of additional models, technologies, and use cases.
Challenges
The key challenges of the project include the definition of consistent and measurable resilience metrics across heterogeneous SatCom architectures, threats, and operational contexts, and the quantification of complex risk-mitigation relationships under uncertainty. A major challenge lies in optimising a highly multidimensional design space affected by non‑linear, non‑convex, and discontinuous behaviours, with a high risk of combinatorial explosion. Additional challenges address computational tractability, model scalability and modularity, and the validation of meaningful, credible optimisation outcomes at system level.
System Architecture
The system architecture is organised as a modular, layered optimisation environment supporting resilience‑by‑design analysis at satcom system level. At its core, a system modelling layer represents configurable reference architectures covering space, ground, and user segments, including key design variables, constraints, and performance parameters.
A dedicated threat and risk layer models heterogeneous threat categories, risk drivers, and impact mechanisms, providing quantified inputs to a resilience assessment layer. This layer implements formal resilience metrics and key performance indicators, ensuring traceability between threats, mitigation strategies, architectural choices, and system‑level outcomes.
Mitigation measures are implemented as modular functional blocks with associated costs, maturity levels, and effectiveness parameters, allowing their integration as optimisation variables. An optimisation engine connects all layers, enabling multidimensional trade‑space exploration across non‑linear and non‑convex problem spaces using selectable optimisation and heuristic techniques.
Supporting components include scenario management, data handling, and visualisation interfaces for analysis, benchmarking, and decision support. The overall architecture emphasises scalability, extensibility, and clear separation of concerns, enabling progressive integration of additional models, algorithms, and use cases.
Plan
The project plan is structured in sequential phases aligned with ESA milestone reviews. Initial phases address reference architecture definition, threat and risk assessment, and preliminary technical specification, concluding with the System Requirements Review. Subsequent phases establish the technical baseline and optimisation approach, leading to the Preliminary Design Review. Prototype design, implementation, and validation activities follow, supporting the Critical Design Review. Final phases consolidate results, deliver roadmaps, and complete documentation, concluding with the Final Review and presentation.
Current Status
The project is in an early execution phase. Activities focus on the definition of representative reference architectures describing multi‑orbit, dual‑use, multi‑system, and multi‑domain satcom scenarios, supported by relevant existing examples. In parallel, a comprehensive state‑of‑the‑art review of applicable threats and mitigation strategies is ongoing. Building on these inputs, the security risk assessment is being initiated to evaluate risks and derive structured correlations between threats and mitigations, forming the basis for the system model underpinning the optimisation tool.
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