This paper deals with the weight estimation of the wing box of a commercial aircraft by means of a procedure suitable for very large liners and/or unconventional configurations for which statistical data and empirical formulas may not be sufficiently reliable. Attention is focused on the need to account for aeroelastic interaction from a very preliminary stage of the design cycle. The procedure exploits the first of three levels of a multilevel structural optimization system conceived for the preliminary design of the wing primary structure and a simplified evaluation of the cross-sectional properties. The comparison between weight estimates obtained with the present procedure and predictions supplied by available literature shows a satisfactory agreement

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Multidisciplinary optimization is playing a fundamental role in the design of aerospace vehicles because of the need to simultaneously take into account the strong interactions among different disciplines to ensure an efficient design. This paper presents a multimodel, multiobjective formulation of the servostructural optimization problem specifically tailored toward airplane preliminary design. Structural and control design variables are simultaneously treated along with constraints and objective functions related to different aeroservoelastic and structural performances. Reduced-order models, based on finite element method/ boundary element method, are adopted to reduce the computational burden of the optimization process.