KNOWLEDGE BASED ENGINEERING TO SUPPORT AIRCRAFT MULTIDISCIPLINARY DESIGN AND OPTIMISATION

摘要

This paper discusses structure and functionalities of a Knowledge Based Engineering application, called Multi Model Generator (MMG), developed to support aircraft multidisciplinary design, analysis and optimisation. Designers can use the MMG as an advanced modeling tool to swiftly generate geometrical models of many and diverse aircraft configurations and variants, by combining and adjusting a limited number of parametric objects, called High Level Primitives. Besides capturing the geometric aspects of design, the MMG has also the capabilities to automate large part of the lengthy and non-creative preprocessing activities involved in the design verification process. The proposed KBE application has demonstrated to be a valuable solution for some of the critical needs indicated by the MDO community, namely: a flexible and robust generative tool to increase the level of automation in aircraft design, including the development of novel configurations; the exploitation of high fidelity analysis tools already in the early design phases; the management of the design activities across distributed networks of disciplines specialists.