MADEsmart: An Environment for Improved Development of Aircraft Components in Preliminary Design

Abstract

The MADEsmart Project represents a unique contribution to the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) Rapid Design Exploration and Optimization (RaDEO) Program and to U.S. industrial aircraft design practice. The project team’s work focused heavily on the introduction of design and manufacturing constraint information early in the product development lifecycle. Since conventional aircraft development efforts are highly inefficient for identifying and managing product requirements and design constraints, a development team’s ability to effectively evaluate proposed design solutions can be negatively impacted. This project’s work employed three main technologies to accomplish its vision of greatly improving the design of aircraft components: (1) intelligent agent technology to streamline coordination between development team resources; (2) Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) technology to allow for rapid design exploration and optimization; and (3) the introduction of design evaluation for manufacturing process constraints at the preliminary stage of design using a natural language processing rep-resentation known as Lexical Conceptual Structures (LCS). This paper provides motivation for the MADEsmart project’s research, an overview of each of its three main focus areas, a more detailed description of each of the technology applications, and some concluding remarks.