Incorporating Multicriteria Decision Analysis Techniques in Aircraft Conceptual Design Process

Abstract

In aerospace systems design, conflicting disciplines and technologies are always involved in the design process. There are often subjective decisions made in the conceptual design phase, and these subjective decisions have significant impacts on the performance of the final design. Multicriteria decision analysis techniques can help designers to effectively deal with such situations and make wise design decisions. The objective of this paper is to explore the feasibility and added values of applying multicriteria decision analysis techniques in aircraft design. In the first part of the paper, we establish a new optimization framework incorporating multicriteria decision analysis techniques in aircraft conceptual design process. Then, we propose an improved multicriteria decision analysis method to aggregate the multiple design criteria into one composite figure of merit for the optimization. The improved multicriteria decision analysis method is able to maintain ranking consistency for the top-ranked alternative. In the second part of the paper, we assess the subjective preferences from different designers in aircraft design process. We solve the specification problem of weighting factors by using Latin hypercube sampling (LHS) with Dirichlet distribution. Finally, we develop surrogate models for the multiple design criteria in terms of weighting factors to perform the uncertainty assessment efficiently.