Software Tools and Data Formats for Data Exchange in Airplane Predesign

Abstract

Nowadays, during the predesign phase of new airplane configurations many different technical disciplines are involved, for example aerodynamics, structure mechanics, flight dynamic, and propulsion technology. There exist strong dependencies between the individual technical disciplines, so that optimization in each single discipline only will inevitably fail to yield a global optimum. Therefore it is necessary to consider the overall system in order to evaluate the potential of new technologies realistically. We present a software solution which enable stand-alone applications to cooperate in a multidiscipline simulation environment to allow for a global optimization process. To this end, an XML-based common data format taylored to the requirements of airplane configuration for data exchange has been defined and a set of libraries for the processing of this data format have been implemented to enable the stand-alone tools to communicate with each other using this format. The data format permits the parametric representations of the geometry of airplane parts and a library to perform geometrical computations based on this representation has been developed. An automated optimization process has been set-up by integrating the separate application's into a simulation framework.