Advances in Collaborative Civil Aeronautical Multidisciplinary Design Optimization

This book presents results from a major European research project—Value Improvement through a Virtual Aeronautical Collaborative Enterprise (VIVACE)—on the collaborative civil aeronautical enterprise. The VIVACE project spanned four years and included 63 partners from multinational companies in 11 European Union countries.

The aim of VIVACE was to enable the Virtual Product concept in a collaborative environment through design, simulation, and integration, starting from the early phases of aircraft conception. In this context the Virtual Product refers to all components that comprise an aircraft—the structure, the systems, and the engines.

The project contributes to the following strategic objectives derived from the 2001 report “European Aeronautics: A Vision for 2020”:

• Halve the time to market for new products with the help of advanced design, manufacturing and maintenance tools, methods, and processes
• Increase the integration of the supply chain into a network
• Maintain a steady and continuous reduction in travel charges through substantial cuts in operating costs.

The book structure follows the phases of a generic design cycle, beginning with chapters covering Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) issues at initial design stages and then gradually moving to more detailed design optimization. The MDO applications are ordered by product complexity, from whole aircraft and engine to single component optimization. Final chapters focus on engineering data management, product life cycle management, security, and automated workflows. Inspired and verified by real industrial use cases, the innovative methods and infrastructure solutions contained in this book present a radical step forward toward the advancement, industrialization, and standardization of the MDO concept.

Researchers and practitioners in the field of complex systems design will benefit from the extensive research presented in this important book.

About the Authors

E. Kesseler has nearly thirty years of experience in the aerospace domain, including real time simulation, embedded software (heading a dedicated department for 8 years), human machine interface, certifiable safe software (including a PhD) and recently in multidisciplinary design. This book reflects the results related to the latter activities. His work covered aircraft, both fixed wing and rotorcraft, air traffic management and satellites. He currently owns his own company.

Professor Marin D. Guenov, MEng, PhD, holds the Chair in Engineering Design at Cranfield University and heads the Advanced Engineering Design Group in the Aerospace Department. He has taken a leading role in a number of national and international research projects supported by the British and European aerospace industry, including the design of complex systems, modelling and simulation, multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization, and infrastructures for collaborative design. Prof. Guenov is a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, a Member of the Royal Aeronautical Society and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and is a Chartered Engineer.