Accelerating the Development of Complex Systems in Aeronautics via MBSE and MDAO: a Roadmap to Agility

The ever-increasing complexity of systems under development in aerospace is demanding to streamline and accelerate the development of innovative products, across the diverse disciplines, and throughout the entire life-cycle. The European funded research and innovation AGILE project introduced a novel paradigm to Multidisciplinary Design Analysis and Optimization (MDAO) processes, shortening the setup time of MDAO systems to more than 40%, with respect to conventional MDAO approaches. However, AGILE project scope was limited to the design and the optimization of the aircraft product itself, for a given set of design requirements and for a given architecture. The follow-up European funded project AGILE4.0 expands the scope, including also the upstream systems engineering phases of the development life-cycle, within the trade-off and optimization activities. This work introduces the conceptual framework under development, which leverages digital engineering approaches and in particular Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). The focus of the framework is on accelerating the setup, deployment and operation of MBSE systems, as well as on streamlining the integration with MDAO system, to in turn accelerate the development of aircraft products. The focus of the framework is on the bridge between MDAO and MBSE. The paper also introduces the on-going investigations which make use of the framework and are collaboratively performed by the Consortium consisting of 18 International Organizations