Conceptual design optimization of a wide-body commercial aircraft using a competitiveness model

Abstract

The conceptual design optimization of wide-body commercial aircraft is very challenging today. This paper deals with the conceptual design optimization problem of a next-cycle wide-body commercial aircraft, which has many similarities to the one being co-developed by China and Russia. The most difficult weaknesses are that the design requirements cannot be traded off during the conceptual design optimization process. To overcome this issue, a competitiveness model is built up for the wide-body commercial aircraft. The analytic hierarchy process is applied to formulate the competitiveness model, which is a multi-level evaluation model. The competiveness model includes three levels, i.e. target level, criteria level, and attributes level. The target level has an output, i.e. the competitiveness of the investigated aircraft, which serves as the single objective function in the conceptual design optimization problem. The criteria level includes four elements of economics, comfort, environmental impact, and adaptability. In addition, each criterion is further divided into more attributes, which are parameters obtained from the commercial aircraft conceptual design. By using the competitiveness model, the conceptual design optimization problem is converted into an unconstrained one that can be solved easily. Two optimizations with different judgment matrices for criteria level were performed. Compared with the baseline design candidate, the overall competitiveness of the optimal design for the optimization case 1 and case 2 increased by 9.28% and 11.51%, respectively, which benefits the designers and decision-makers.

Modelling and Design Optimization of a Novel Wide‐Body Transport Aircraft to Improve the Structural Integrity

“…Te design process of a novel MoM transport aircraft has been carried out based on the study the prospects of integrating with advanced airframe technologies to minimize MTOW. Mathematically, MTOW (W T0 ) is a summation of passenger, crew, and cargo weight (W passenger+crew+cargo ), empty weight (W empty ), and fuel weight (W fuel ) as expressed in equation (1). Further simplifcation of the above equation (1), yields…”

“…Mathematically, MTOW (W T0 ) is a summation of passenger, crew, and cargo weight (W passenger+crew+cargo ), empty weight (W empty ), and fuel weight (W fuel ) as expressed in equation (1). Further simplifcation of the above equation (1), yields…”

“…Besides the design parameters, many researchers approached designing an efcient aircraft using design optimization techniques [1], especially for industrial design. Design optimization techniques are an approachable method that has been drastically applied to transport aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in the last 6 years.…”

“…Chai et al [14] described how to enhance fuel efciency using multipoint over single-point optimization techniques. Li et al [1] applied the fdelity optimization technique to improve wide-body aircraft's competitiveness. Ma and Elham [22] designed a novel TF confguration using a surrogated model and compared it with the conventional confguration yields to improve 20% fuel economy and 7% MTOW.…”

“…Te latest study says the global aircraft manufacturing market (GAMM) will be worth USD 626.25 billion by 2030. Te report forecasts for future market growth demand are reviving by increasing production to meet resurgent demand for wide-body jets [1]. In the year 2015, Boeing identifed a market niche for a new airplane confguration called middle-of-the-market (MoM) aircraft.…”