Quantification of Margins and Uncertainties - History

History

The fundamental concepts of QMU were originally developed concurrently at several national laboratories supporting nuclear weapons programs in the late 1990’s, including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. The original focus of the methodology was to support nuclear stockpile decision making, an area where full experimental test data could no longer be generated for validation due to bans on nuclear weapons testing. The methodology has since been applied in other applications where safety or mission critical decisions for complex projects must be made using results based on modeling and simulation. Examples outside of the nuclear weapons field include applications at NASA for interplanetary spacecraft and rover development, missile six-degree-of-freedom (6DOF) simulation results, and characterization of material properties in terminal ballistic encounters.