Conceptual design optimization of a wide-body commercial aircraft using a competitiveness model

Abstract

The conceptual design optimization of wide-body commercial aircraft is very challenging today. This paper deals with the conceptual design optimization problem of a next-cycle wide-body commercial aircraft, which has many similarities to the one being co-developed by China and Russia. The most difficult weaknesses are that the design requirements cannot be traded off during the conceptual design optimization process. To overcome this issue, a competitiveness model is built up for the wide-body commercial aircraft. The analytic hierarchy process is applied to formulate the competitiveness model, which is a multi-level evaluation model. The competiveness model includes three levels, i.e. target level, criteria level, and attributes level. The target level has an output, i.e. the competitiveness of the investigated aircraft, which serves as the single objective function in the conceptual design optimization problem. The criteria level includes four elements of economics, comfort, environmental impact, and adaptability. In addition, each criterion is further divided into more attributes, which are parameters obtained from the commercial aircraft conceptual design. By using the competitiveness model, the conceptual design optimization problem is converted into an unconstrained one that can be solved easily. Two optimizations with different judgment matrices for criteria level were performed. Compared with the baseline design candidate, the overall competitiveness of the optimal design for the optimization case 1 and case 2 increased by 9.28% and 11.51%, respectively, which benefits the designers and decision-makers.