Multi-disciplinary integrated aircraft cost suite for optimisation study

The importance of engineering costing within aircraft design should have a more directly influential role. A challenge for the scientific community is to adapt and to exploit the trend towards greater multidisciplinary focus in research and technology, particularly with regard to utilising cost as a metric within the process. There is a strong need to understand the cost associated with different competing concepts, and this could be addressed by incorporating cost estimation in the design process. The key feature of the developed cost suite is that it captures the attributes of a design that drive the cost, which generally is not only weight, but also assembly and detailed manufacturing costs, which are directly taken into account by means of component layout and manufacturing rules. This paper outlines the continuation of a previous work made on the integration of a Cost Suite for preliminary aircraft design within an environment framework that can automatically take inputs from external sources and allow optimisation study at early design stage