Integrated servostructural optimization in the design of aerospace systems

Multidisciplinary optimization is playing a fundamental role in the design of aerospace vehicles because of the need to simultaneously take into account the strong interactions among different disciplines to ensure an efficient design. This paper presents a multimodel, multiobjective formulation of the servostructural optimization problem specifically tailored toward airplane preliminary design. Structural and control design variables are simultaneously treated along with constraints and objective functions related to different aeroservoelastic and structural performances. Reduced-order models, based on finite element method/ boundary element method, are adopted to reduce the computational burden of the optimization process.