Advancing the State-of-the-art in the Civil Aircraft Design: a Knowledge-based Multidisciplinary Engineering Approach

To design better aircraft and engines, co-operation is of prime importance. In aircraft design Co-operation has many facets, such as the involvement of experts in various disciplines that work together and share their specific knowledge. Often such experts are employed by different companies and are thus geographically dispersed. The early phases in, for instance, aircraft wing design allow much freedom to optimise the wing by synergistically exploiting the mutually interacting phenomena of the disciplines involved, i.e. use Multidisciplinary Design Optimisation (MDO) combined with knowledge-based engineering. Disciplines involved in the multidisciplinary wing design analyses include geometry generation, engine sizing, structural optimisation and