A real-time information integration framework for multidisciplinary coupling of complex aircrafts: an application of IIIE

Industrial information integration engineering (IIIE) is an interdisciplinary field with the typical characteristics of enormous and complex systems. As typical enormous and complex objects, hypersonic aircrafts are in urgent need of analyzing and evaluating the performance of the entire flight process to provide effective support for design and optimization. Hypersonic vehicles involve the complicated coupling of multiple disciplines and multiple physical fields, which makes the information integration of multiple disciplines and physical fields greatly challenging. In this paper, a real-time information integration framework for multidisciplinary coupling is proposed as an IIIE application to support the real-time virtual testing of the entire flight process. In this framework, three key concepts for information coupling integration are introduced and described in detail. These concepts are the field-state iteration, geometry-based physical field, and pipeline operator. Furthermore, X-43A was considered as an example and its virtual interdisciplinary model was developed based on aerodynamics, structures, the engine flow of the scramjet, six-degrees-of-freedom (6-DOF) dynamics, and control. The virtual test results were analyzed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed real-time information integration framework.