Exploring Collaborative and Multidisciplinary Aircraft Optimization through the AGILE Academy Challenge -- A case study for an aircraft auxiliary solar power system

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how a collaborative, multidisciplinary aircraft optimization process can be effectively applied to evaluate a solar power system on an aircraft, showcasing the AGILE toolchain's capabilities in a real-world case study.

Contribution

It presents a novel application of the AGILE toolchain for collaborative aircraft design, integrating multidisciplinary optimization and surrogate models in a student-led case study.

Findings

Successful development of a collaborative workflow for aircraft optimization

Feasibility assessment of auxiliary solar power system on aircraft

Validation of AGILE toolchain's effectiveness in multidisciplinary design

Abstract

Reduction in aircraft emission is a main driver for the development of more efficient aircraft and enabling technologies are reaching operational maturity. Aircraft manufacturers need an efficient product development process to capture these emergent technologies and develop new aircraft concepts in order to stay competitive. Presently, the aircraft development process is cross organizational, and harnesses distributed, heterogeneous knowledge and expertise. Large scale multidisciplinary studies, involving disciplinary experts and specific tools are required to evaluate different aircraft concepts. These MultiDisciplinary Aircraft Optimization (MDAO) processes are difficult to deploy as they involve cross-organizational collaboration and harmonization of processes, tools and even vocabulary. Moreover, difficulties in collaborative decision making, reconfiguration and integration of new requirements and competencies often precludes the development of an optimal solution within the available time. To address these challenges, the AGILE project is an effort within the European Union funded Horizon 2020 project to reduce aircraft development time by developing tools and processes that enable efficient, collaborative aircraft design. This paper presents the work performed as part of the AGILE academy challenge where students were tasked with developing and solving an aircraft MDAO problem using the AGILE toolchain. Each team consisted of students from various universities around the globe and had expertise in multiple design domains. An MDAO study is presented that utilizes the AGILE toolchain to investigate the feasibility of implementing an auxiliary solar power system on a baseline aircraft. The steps performed are: (1) definition of a multidisciplinary design problem, (2) development of collaborative workflow and (3) optimization using surrogate models. Through the case study, a novel technology concept is investigated and the efficacy of the AGILE toolchain in facilitating a MDAO is analyzed.