Methodological enhancements in MDO process investigated in the AGILE European project

This paper presents methodological investigations performed in research activities in the field of MDO in overall aircraft design in the ongoing EU funded research project AGILE. AGILE is developing the next generation of aircraft Multidisciplinary Design and Optimization processes, which target significant reductions in aircraft development costs and time to market, leading to cheaper and greener aircraft solutions. The paper introduces the AGILE project structure and describes the achievements of the 1st year (Design Campaign 1) leading to a reference distributed MDO system. A focus is then made on the different novel optimization techniques studied during the 2nd year, all willing to ease the optimization of complex work flows, characterized by high degree of discipline interdependencies, high number of design variables in the context of multi-level and multi-partner collaborative engineering projects. Then the implementation of these methods in the enhanced MDO framework is discussed.