Military UAV Family Configuration Decision Based on Combining Expert System with Low Fidelity MDO

Considering the share components induce the penalty of performance in aircraft family design, this paper studies the aircraft family configuration decision by expert system and MDO. As the design analysis of aircraft family is very complex, expert system bases on modified multidimensional game theory, which more refines the components decompose and increases the mission dimension. In order to achieving simultaneous design of each aircraft in family to reduce the compute cost, a low fidelity Collaborative Optimization (CO) is applied. Lastly, military UAV family is analyzed to validate above method. The mission requirements include mainly high altitude reconnaissance, middle altitude reconnaissance, short range attack and long distance attack. The performances (such as takeoff weight) comparison has be shown in analysis result. According to the result, the aircraft costs could be reduced under restricted performance penalty through certain common components analysis.