Demonstration of a probabilistic technique for the determination of aircraft economic viability

Abstract

Over the past few years, modern aircraft design has experienced a paradigm shift from designing for performance to designing for affordability. This paper contains a probabilistic approach that will allow traditional deterministic design methods to be extended to account for disciplinary, economic, and technological uncertainty. The probabilistic approach was facilitated by the Fast Probability Integration (FPI) technique; a technique which allows the designer to gather valuable information about the vehicleÕs behavior in the design space. This technique is efficient for assessing multi-attribute, multiconstraint problems in a more realistic fashion. For implementation purposes, this technique is applied to illustrate how both economic and technological uncertainty associated with a Very Large Transport aircraft may be assessed. The assessment is evaluated with the FPI technique to determine the cumulative probability distributions of the design space, as bound by economic objectives and performance constraints. These distributions were compared to established targets for a comparable large capacity aircraft, similar in size to the Boeing 747-400. The conventional baseline configuration design space was determined to be marginally feasible and non-viable, motivating the infusion of advanced technologies, including laminar flow control, advanced materials, and advances in propulsion technology as to reflect 2005 entry into service. The resulting system benefits and penalties were qualitatively assessed with technology metric ÒkÓ factors. The infusion of technologies shifted the VLT design into regions of greater feasibility and viability. The study also demonstrated a method and relationship by which the impact of new technologies may be assessed in a more system focused approach. The impact of technology readiness and its associated risk was also addressed in this study and is not presented here.

Metamodels for Computer-based Engineering Design: Survey and recommendations

“…Toward this end, RDS combines design of experiments and response surface metamodels with Monte Carlo simulation and Fast Probability Techniques [113] to achieve customer satisfaction through robust systems design [72]. RDS has been applied to the design of a High Speed Civil Transport aircraft [71,71] and very large transports [114]. RDS has also been used to study the economic uncertainty of the HSCT [115] and the feasibility/viability of aircraft [116].…”

A Probabilistic Conceptual Design Analysis for Multi-Stages Launch Vehicles

“…The method of fast probability integration and direct simulation (Ref. 3) are the two other methods that can be used to create the modeling and simulation environment.…”

A stochastic approach to multi-disciplinary aircraft analysis and design

“…A third type of uncertainty arises through the inclusion of information about the readiness of new technological concepts and their associated risk into the design process. This information can also be modeled with random variables by recognizing the uncertain value of the metric in question, and assigning an appropriate distribution to that metric [21]. The result of the analysis in all three cases will be a probability distribution for the objective function.…”

“…Application of RDS can be found in [ 1,6,14,21,25]. A principle advantage of this construction is that it gives the designer the ability to concurrently consider the aforementioned aspects of design at the conceptual level.…”

“…Three methods that incorporate such complex computer programs in a probabilistic systems design approach have been described by Fox[7] and are shown in Table I. The use of metamodels has found the widest application and has also been used in the past [1,6,14,21,25,26,28,29]. The use of statistical regression models, based on Taylor series expansions, along with experimental designs is very popular [1,6,14,25,26,28,29,30,31,32].…”