MDAX : ENHANCEMENTS IN A COLLABORATIVE MDAO WORKFLOW FORMULATION TOOL

Kurzfassung

The design of a complex product like an aircraft involves different engineering disciplines, which are coupled with each other and exchange data in terms of inputs and outputs. Integration of such disciplines, their interaction with each other and exchange of diverse datasets leads to a time and resource intensive workflow development process. The interconnections between the coupled disciplines can lead to design inconsistency and transparency loss. To address these issues, the MDAO Workflow Design Accelerator (MDAx) was developed. MDAx bridges the gap between the competence deployment phase and multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization (MDAO) workflow execution by offering a comprehensive MDAO workflow modeling platform. It is designed to be quick to learn and user-friendly to operate, and provides efficient methods to inspect and explore the different disciplinary components of the workflow and their data couplings. MDAx uses the eXtended Design Structure Matrix (XDSM) representation to describe the workflows and takes a step further with some additional operations resulting in an executable workflow which can be exported to process integration platforms. This paper presents the latest additions to the environment, like modelling sub-workflows as components, supporting dynamic MDAO, value based identification of variables, and separate execution tool naming. These developments are made based on feedback from various collaboration partners, in order to enhance the ease of adoption of collaborative MDAO paradigms by competence developers without requiring expert knowledge in MDAO architecting. Several application cases that leveraged the capabilities of MDAx in the past few years are presented to demonstrate the potential of the software.