Towards a seamless simulation of the air transport system

To create revolutionary solutions answering the increasing demands on the air transport system of the future, a systematic and integrative consideration of all disciplines across the complete product lifecycle is needed. Through the development and utilization of a well-balanced mix of design process digitalization and the development of a corresponding design process methodology, actively involving the heterogeneous disciplinary specialists, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) has fostered effective collaboration between the multitude of disciplines involved over the past decade. The combined effort has led to the maturation of a framework for the seamless connection of disciplinary knowledge in a highly-scalable distributed multidisciplinary collaboration framework for air vehicle design. This paper describes the components of the developed distributed collaboration framework and provides an overview of the broad range of air vehicle design initiatives in which the framework has been successfully applied. On the basis of this, an outlook in future enhancements of the overall design methodology is presented, ultimately targeting to obtain an air vehicle architecture optimization framework capable of seamlessly covering the entire design lifecycle of revolutionary air transport systems