Scanning the sky

AN EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OF 3 TECHNICAL PAPERS ON THE AGILE RESEARCH PROJECT, PRESENTED AT THE AIAA AVIATION FORUM

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​Aircraft 3rd Generation MDO for Innovative Collaboration of Heterogeneous Teams of Experts

The AGILE innovation project is granted by the European Commission. AGILE targets multidisciplinary optimization using distributed analysis frameworks to significantly reduce aircraft development costs and time-to-market, delivering more cost-effective and greener aircraft solutions. The AGILE project is set up to proof a 40% speedup for solving realistic MDO problems compared to today’s state-of-the-art technologies. The use cases considered in the AGILE project are realistic overall aircraft design tasks for conventional, strut-braced, box-wing and BWB configurations. The development scope includes:

  • advanced optimization techniques and strategies,
  • techniques for collaboration,
  • knowledge-enabled information technologies.


The AGILE project runs from 2015 to 2018, and is part of Horizon 2020, the EU Framework Program for Research and Innovation.

A team of 19 partners

To meet the challenges of the AGILE project, a team of 19 industry, research and academic partners from Europe, Canada and Russia collaborate together. The composition of the team reflects the heterogeneous structure that is characteristic for today’s design teams. The budget of the project is close to 9 Million Euro, with around 7 Million Euro provided by the European Commission.

Framework and optimization capabilities as required for agile collaboration are provided on Noesis Solutions' state-of-the-art flagship product Optimus. The integration of AGILE results into our products ensures the dissemination of new technologies, enabling leading manufacturing companies to cope with ever increasing pressure to develop better products faster.

Intermediate results of the AGILE project have been summarized in 3 technical papers that will be presented at the AIAA Aviation Forum in Denver, Colorado (June 5th-9th, 2017).

3 technical papers presented at the AIAA Aviation Forum

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A Collaborative Architecture supporting AGILE Design of Complex Aeronautics Products

A technical paper prepared by DLR German Aerospace Center, NRL Netherlands Aerospace Centre & Noesis Solutions - presented on Thursday June 8 at 10:00 AM; Plaza Court 7.

Current state-of-the-art aircraft development processes have a multidisciplinary and multiobjective nature. The major challenge is to guarantee a streamlined integration of all the necessary design competences, and account for an ever increasing number of disciplines already in early stages of the development. The challenge is even greater when specialized competences are provided by several multidisciplinary teams that are distributed among different organizations. It is therefore important to connect not only the product models and simulation capabilities between organizations, but also to join competences of the corresponding experts and make them collaborate in order to accelerate the design process.

Details AIAA Aviation Forum session»

Methodological Enhancements in MDO Process Investigated in the AGILE European Project

A technical paper prepared by Onera - The French Aerospace Lab, Noesis Solutions & University of Naples "Federico II" - presented on Thursday June 8 at 11:00 AM; Plaza Court 7.

In this paper, optimization techniques in the field of aircraft design investigated in the AGILE project are presented and assessed on a shared use case - both for a deterministic and stochastic approach. In the first year of the AGILE project, a reference distributed MDO system has been formulated and deployed using preliminary design tools and methodologies available in the consortium and applied to the design and optimization of a reference conventional aircraft configuration. In the second year of the AGILE project, a first step consists of investigating and benchmarking different novel optimization techniques on a reference MDO problem while the second step will focus on smartly combining these techniques on a MDO test bench approach. This technical paper presents the optimization methods investigated and the results obtained on a shared test case.

Details AIAA Aviation Forum session»

Automated Selection of the Optimal On-board Systems Architecture within MDO Collaborative Environment

A technical paper prepared by Politecnico di Torino, Central Institute of Aviation Motors & Noesis Solutions - presented on Monday June 5 at 12:00 PM; Director's Row H.

On-board systems are becoming increasingly important in aircraft design , while the introduction of new technologies related to the More Electric Aircraft and All Electric Aircraft concepts have raised the interest in on-board systems design. The present paper discusses the selection of the on-board systems architecture introducing a new workflow that is able to identify the best architecture in terms of procurement and operating cost. The effect of architecture selection on engine performance is considered including a detailed engine module. The workflow is implemented in the Optimus framework and its potential is explored on the H2020 AGILE regional jet test case.

Details AIAA Aviation Forum session»

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