Aerospace Concept Exploration System: Architecture and Methods for an Air Vehicle Design Tool

Abstract

The capability to assess aerospace vehicle designs independently, consistently and rapidly can help RAND address complex technological and operational questions with agility, objectivity and precision. The Aerospace Concept Exploration System (ACES) is a computational conceptual air vehicle design tool that can answer first-order questions about air vehicle configuration, size and weight. ACES accepts design requirements and constraints as inputs and produces optimized designs as outputs. ACES computes vehicle performance figures using a suite of physics-based and empirically derived models. An efficient gradient-based optimizer drives design convergence with respect to constraints. Ongoing work on the ACES software architecture aims to contain complexity and support future code extensions. Currently, the tool can be used to design vehicles operating in the subsonic and transonic regimes. The intended users of ACES are engineers and analysts who have a basic understanding of air vehicle design and of modeling and simulation. In the RAND context, the ACES design tool can serve as the vehicle design component of large-scale end-to-end concept development and system evaluations.