Multidisciplinary and Multifidelity Framework for Evaluating System-of-Systems Capabilities of Unmanned Aircraft

Abstract

The operational environment of aerospace products can have a big impact on their performance, and therefore it is an aspect that should be considered as early as possible in their development process. In this light, this paper presents an analysis and optimization framework that can be used in the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in order to efficiently explore the design space when considering system-of-systems (SoS) formulations. In this work, the problem is decomposed with a multilevel architecture, and it is divided into three parts, which enable a multifidelity evaluation of the SoS, constituent systems (CS), and subsystems (SS) levels. To be able to capture the collaboration between different assets at an SoS level the framework includes an in-house tool for performing agent-based simulations, whereas the specifications of each CS are analyzed through a set of basic aeronautical disciplines and a number of SS models. The framework is tested against two surveillance scenarios by considering existing as well as new UAV designs, and overall it is shown that the exploration of SoS enables to identify better capabilities; that the operational environment poses different requirements on all system levels; and that fleet tactics have a profound effect on mission performance.