Disciplinary Implications of a System Architecting Approach to Collaborative Aircraft Design

Abstract

In the face of growing public awareness of environmental issues such as climate change, the pressure to provide efficient and ecological new air transport solutions is higher than ever on the aviation community. To this aim, unconventional aircraft configurations, which are radically different from the established tube-and-wing architecture, may hold a lot of potential [1]. However, OEMs today usually shy away from such configurations due to the significantly increased uncertainty and entrepreneurial risk connected to such drastic design changes. In order to reduce the risk and increase knowledge about a new configuration, the application of physics-based analyses on a virtual aircraft can add significant value, when applied in the early stages of the design process by bringing new technologies to higher TRLs quickly. Due to the highly multidisciplinary nature of the aircraft design task, the success of this approach largely depends not only on the well-organized handling of the available product data at any point in the design process but also the smart sequencing of the disciplinary contributions based on their mutual dependencies. In this paper, a methodology for an integrated and collaborative approach to preliminary aircraft design is presented. It applies several well established components, such as CPACS (Common Parametric Aircraft Configuration Schema) [2] as a central product data schema and RCE (Remote Component Environment) [3] which enables an automated collaborative approach to aircraft design and combines them with methods from system architecting and model-based engineering [4]. Furthermore, the requirements for a disciplinary analysis and design tool to contribute to an integrated multidisciplinary design process are highlighted. Three examples are given, assuming the perspective of a structural designer: · An unmanned aerial vehicle from the AGILE project [4], where a cross-organizational workflow has been set up in order to perform aero-structural MDO on the wing planform [5]. · A Prandtl-plane configuration from the Parsifal project [6]. Here, a tail plane design and sizing is performed using data collected from a variety of partners. · A conventional configuration from the InDiCaD project, where the structural layout is designed in tandem with the cabin [7, 8]. The example cases demonstrate the initial investment necessary in order to integrate a disciplinary tool into a multidisciplinary environment as well as the potential benefits of being able to perform the analysis within a larger context.

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