Optimum Selection of "Number of Seats/Cargo Volume" for Transports in Uncertain Business Environment

Abstract

Increasing competition in the transport commercial market has resulted in many changes in the aircraft design process. There is a great tendency to include economic factors such as "affordability" in the design process. On the other hand, the so-called market dynamics are also getting complicated and a design team has to deal with many uncertainties as far as the business environment is concerned. This leads to the need for new decision-making tools in the early stages of the design process. This paper introduces a decision-making algorithm based on fuzzy logic systems which provides a structured approach to deal with uncertainties in the aircraft preliminary design. The developed tool leads the design team to a series of alternatives and a more robust solution for important parameters such as number of seats and cargo capacity to meet different market demands. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the new proposed approach, methodology was applied to two wide-body transport aircraft with missions similar to B-747-400 and A-380. The results show that existing uncertainties in the future economic environment would have more impact on A-380 compared with that of B-747-400. That is, wide-body transport airplanes with less than 520 passenger seats have more chance to fly economically if relying only on the passenger market. It is further shown that aircraft with more than 520 seats need special provisions to carry cargo loads for their extra payload capacities. Nomenclature N s = number of passenger seats R = range S = wing area W F = airplane fuel weight