The place of evolutionary search tools in problem solving environments for aerospace design

This paper sets out to show that evolutionary search tools have an important role to play in the development of Problem Solving Environments (PSE's) for aerospace design. Distributed and versatile PSE's are now being prototyped in a number of research and industrial groups around the world and can be expected to take a central place in the toolkit of future aerospace designers. The role played in these systems by evolutionary methods includes improvements of the design process as well as the search for better products via goal oriented optimization. These and related aspects of aerospace design are illustrated here with examples from the fields of satellite, airframe and aeroengine design