Optimization of Future Aircraft Concepts and Their Operational Environment

With aviation being responsible for about 2.5% of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, industry efforts have been aimed toward achieving carbon neutrality. For designers, this means that they are having to incorporate radically different technologies into their future aircraft concepts.

As a result of the baked-in biases of each sector within the industry, designers are needing to optimize the configuration of aircraft to come to an agreement on what the aviation sector will have to look like in the future. Despite this, off-the-shelf optimization routines are not suitable for this purpose. This is for two reasons.

On the one hand, the aircraft design space is highly complex, consisting of both discrete and continuous variables. On the other hand, there are several critical objectives in the design of aircraft, meaning that navigating the design space requires a good way to rank designs. Current Multi-Objective (MO) design tools rely on either using Pareto equivalence or a weight-based objective function.

The former results in a multi-dimensional trade-off that cannot be well-understood by the designer, whereas the latter method can be manipulated inconspicuously to obtain a desired outcome.

This project aims to tackle the aforementioned problems by using a multidisciplinary approach. First, new technologies and operating environments will be studied and modelled. Such technologies include clean propulsion systems powered by alternative energy sources, including hydrogen.

This aspect of the project falls under the Hydrogen and Alternative Energy Vectors EPSRC research area. Secondly, a tool that can optimise the aircraft configuration and its operating environment will be developed. One of the major goals of this project is to generalise this tool to allow it to optimise other systems of systems. This aspect of the project falls under the Engineering Design EPSRC research area.

This project is a continuation of my MEng project, which itself was related to the work undertaken by former PhD students from the University of Cambridge. In these past projects, it is proposed and shown that a promising algorithm to build the required system of systems is Tabu Search (TS) combined with Multiple Dominance Relations (MDR). This project will further test the capabilities of MDR, a new ranking method for multiple objectives, by extending the design space from just the aircraft to the aircraft and its operating environment.