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Competitive aircraft box structures are a perfect compromise between weight and price. The conceptual design process of these structures is a typical Multidisciplinary Design and Optimization effort, normally conducted by human engineers. The iterative nature of MDO turns development into a long and costly process. Knowledge-Based Engineering can be used to automate this process by capturing relevant design process knowledge, which is then re-used inside a computer application. This research will introduce a parametric, generative box model that has been developed using KBE techniques. The generality and rule-basedness of this model allows for the automatic generation of a wide range of box configurations and variants, thereby enabling a thorough exploration of the design space. Structural and price analyses tools have been coupled to the box model to generate the required discipline-specific performance data. With the product model and coupled analysis tools ready, the goal is to automatically optimize for minimum weight and price without human intervention. The design of Gulfstream 650 rudder is considered as initial use case, the first experiences of which are discussed in this paper. |
