Aircraft Design Optimization for Commercial Air Travel under Multi-Domain Uncertainties

摘要

The task of determining the requirements of a new, yet-to-be introduced aircraft, which is to serve alongside other existing aircraft in an airline's fleet, to optimize an airline-level metric (like maximizing profit), is a challenging task to address as a single problem. Aircraft design choices made to meet a set of requirements dictate the performance of the aircraft, and this aircraft performance influences how the airline might use the aircraft The fleet-level operations of the airline generally flies aircraft at off-design conditions for operational missions; the impact of these operational missions on the airline-level objective should influence the new aircraft requirements. The uncertainties in predictions of the new, yet-to-be-introduced aircraft performance and costs and uncertainties in the passenger travel demand further exacerbate the problem of determining these requirements. Recent efforts have posed approaches to address this problem, but generally with a deterministic perspective. This research adopts a previously developed subspace decomposition approach and integrates features from robust/ reliability based optimization to address the problem. The paper demonstrates the utility of the approach to determine the "right" design requirements for a new aircraft that a notional airline with a 31-route service network would acquire to maximize expected profit subject to various constraints considering important uncertainties in the new aircraft design and in the passenger demand. The result demonstrates the ability of the framework to identify the design requirements for the new aircraft, and a posterior analysis indicates that the framework acceptably handles the uncertainties.