TRUSS : AN INTELLIGENT DESIGN SYSTEM FOR AIRCRAFT WINGS Preston

Competitive leadership in the international marketplace, superiority in national defense, excellence in productivity, and safety of both private and public systems are all national defense goals which are dependent on superior engineering design. In recent years, it has become more evident that early design decisions are critical, and when only based Qn performance often result in products which are too expensive, hard to manufacture, or unsupportable. Better use of computer-aided design tools and information-based technologies is required to produce better quality U.S. products. This paper outlines a program to explore the use of knowledge based expert sys tems coupled with numerical optimization, database management techniques, and designer interface methods in a networked design environment to improve and assess design changes due to changing emphasis or requirements. The initial structural design of a tiltrotor aircraft wing is used as a representative example to demonstrate the approach being followed. Introduction As it becomes more evident that the early stages of design of complex products are where critical life cycle decisions are made, there is increasing pressure to obtain more knowledge and address more requirements early. For advanced aeronautical vehicles, this requirement growth is depicted in Figure 1. The relationship between design freedom and knowledge is illustrated in Figure 2. The obvious goal is to steepen the knowledge curve early to take advantage of the design freedom. DESIGN REQUIREMENTS GROWTH FOR ADVANCED AERONAUTICAL VEHICLES PRODUClBlLlTY