может раскроете содержание термина. В целом перевод может быть изучение ремесла, профессии?
Trade study - это дисциплина анализа. В
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_studies она определяется след.образ.
"A trade study or trade-off study is the activity of a multidisciplinary team to identify the most balanced technical solutions among a set of proposed viable solutions (FAA 2006). These viable solutions are judged by their satisfaction of a series of measures or cost functions. These measures describe the desirable characteristics of a solution. They may be conflicting or even mutually exclusive. Trade studies are commonly used in the design of aerospace and automotive vehicles and the software selection process (Phillips et al 2002) to find the configuration that best meets conflicting performance requirements."
В другом тексте ("Adapting UML for an Object Oriented Systems Engineering Method (OOSEM)"):
"Optimize and Evaluate Alternatives ... activity is
invoked throughout the other OOSEM activities to
optimize the candidate architectures and conduct TRADE
STUDIES to select the preferred architecture. Parametric
models for characteristics such as performance,
reliability, availability, and life-cycle cost are used to
analyze and optimize each candidate architecture to the
level needed to compare the alternatives. The
parametric models use architectural components defined
in the logical and allocated architectures and their
associated performance parameters. TRADE STUDIES are
used to evaluate each alternative architecture based on
defined criteria and weighting, which are traceable to
the system requirements and measures of effectiveness"
[Приемы и Методы Анализа] Преамбула