Current aircraft development programs are realized as collaborative and multi-organizational design processes. A major challenge hampering cost effective design processes is the integration of multidisciplinary competences within the so-called virtual enterprise. The challenge is even greater when the required design services are provided by heterogeneous teams of specialists that are distributed among different organizations, and across nations. On the other hand, by nature, individual SME, IND, RES and HES alone can neither establish all the necessary competences nor system competence. Therefore, the development of a “more competitive supply chain” is the key-enabler to deliver innovative aircraft products in a time and cost-efficient manner.
The state-of-the-art Multidisciplinary Design and Optimization (MDO) capabilities relies on high performance computing infrastructures, efficient optimization strategies, sophisticated simulation-based analyses in all the flight physics domains, and robust process management frameworks. Nevertheless, the exploitation of the full MDO potentials for the development of a complete aircraft is still an open challenge. Analyzing the current generation of MDO design systems, the AGILE Consortium has identified that major obstacles are largely related to the efforts required to setup and deploy complex collaborative development process.
AGILE ambition is to achieve the reduction of 20% in time to converge the design of an aircraft and a 40% in time needed to setup and solve the multidisciplinary problem in a team of heterogeneous specialists.
Hence, the overall AGILE project objective is to achieve a significant reduction in aircraft development costs through a more competitive supply chain able to reduce the time to market of innovative aircraft products.
The overall project objective is translated into the following 4 technical objectives:
1. the development of advanced MDO techniques, and effective setup and integration methodologies in the design process reducing the convergence time in aircraft optimization
2. the development of processes and techniques for efficient multisite collaboration in overall aircraft design teams
3. the development of knowledge enabled information technologies to support interdisciplinary design task by processes formalization and automation
4. to develop and publish an open MDO test suite
The composition of the AGILE consortium reflects the heterogeneous structure characteristic for today’s aircraft development teams and virtual supply chains: including airframe OEMs, suppliers, as well as specialist design teams. Hence, multiple collaborative scenarios are formulated and resolved during the project.
