Objectives

The high level target of AGILE is to obtain a significant reduction in development costs of aircraft through the implementation of a more competitive supply chain at the early stages of design. This will be reached by practicing research on the project’s four technical objectives.

1. Notwithstanding the availability of powerful software systems to integrate complex computational design processes, today there is a lack of quantified knowledge on how optimization workflows involving many disciplines, ranging up to high levels of fidelity codes, should be set up in the most effective and efficient way. To this purpose, the first objective of AGILE is the structured development of advanced multidisciplinary optimization techniques and their integration, reducing the convergence time in aircraft optimization.
2. Today’s advanced analysis codes and software tools are mostly discipline-specific and well understood by disciplinary experts. However; the operation of the system of tools as a whole and the interpretation of the results are additional challenges in the collaboration between the disciplinary specialists, and the aircraft generalists. Therefore, the second objective of AGILE is the structured development of processes and techniques for efficient multisite collaboration in the overall design teams.
3. Mastering complex systems highly depends on the exploitation of knowledge. Besides the interaction of experts, the smart handling of data, information and knowledge using information technologies offers high potential. Thus; the third objective of AGILE is the structured development of knowledge enabled information technologies to support interdisciplinary design campaigns.

4. The fourth objective of AGILE is to develop and publish an Open MDO Test Suite, enabling the access to the project technologies by other research activities, and providing a reference database for future aircraft configurations research.