Agile Decision Support System for Aircraft Design

With the increasing complexity of modern aircraft technology and tight coupling among subsystems, the design of aircraft requires collaborative work of experts in various fields to make the right decisions, and therefore achieve the expected performance with less cost and risk. In this paper, an agile decision support system (ADSS) for aircraft design was proposed by comprehensively integrating and applying modeling and simulation (M&S), artificial intelligence, data mining, and group decision-making technology. The ADSS provides a rich set of simulation, assessment, and optimization tools for decision makers, which can offer an important objective reference to effectively improve the decision accuracy. A simulation and test environment was implemented for rapid assessment of different designs based on the developed multidisciplinary and multiphysical coupling virtual prototyping models and three kinds of virtual test methods. In the process of group decision making, valuable application modes can be discovered through data mining to reduce decision-making difficulty and improve the efficiency. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis-based multilevel optimization strategy was developed for high-dimensional optimization design problems to meet the fast response requirement of the ADSS. Different cases were given for the data mining application, virtual test, and optimization design, respectively, to validate the proposed agile decision-making process.