Aircraft Conceptual Design by Collaborative Manual and Automatic Agents

In real applications, it is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to define function(s) that measure the “true merit” of a design object. For example, even the most prominent aircraft designers would not dare to claim that a particular set of merit and constraint functions measures the “true merit” of a class of aircraft. The traditional approach to set up a “machine centric” optimization cannot effectively address this issue because there is no user interaction with the numerical optimization at design or run time. The semiautomatic concept, however, can help because the user is allowed to interact with the design problem and the design progress in-the-loop, such that the design criteria can be improved relatively easily at design time. This paper briefly describes the semi-automatic design optimization setup which was introduced in full detail in a previous paper by the author. A simple multidisciplinary aircraft conceptual design optimization problem is then specified based on Torenbeek (1992). Various modes of in-the-loop user control on the search progress and the search problem then illustrate the potential benefits of allowing the user to interact with a numerical agent at various levels of automation. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification: 65K10, 90C29, 90C31, 93B51. 1991 Computing Reviews Classification System: B.5.2, C.4., D.4.7, F.1.2., J.6.