Comparisons of Results for a High-fidelity Aeroelastic Optimization Benchmark Problem

As the aerospace industry looks to improve fuel efficiency and reduce design cycle time, high-fidelity aeroelastic analysis and optimization are becoming increasingly relevant for the more flexible aircraft designs required to achieve sustainable aviation goals. Not having a consistent benchmark optimization problem with a common configuration, set of design variables, objectives, constraints, etc. makes it difficult to compare approaches and creates an obstacle for the aerospace community to collaborate to advance the state of the art for high-fidelity aeroelastic optimization. The High-fidelity Aeroelastic Optimization Benchmark Working Group was established at AIAA SciTech 2024 to create and study a set of benchmark aeroelastic optimization cases that the community can use to compare methods on the same aeroelastic optimization problems. Three benchmark optimization problems were developed and refined during 2024, and participants presented results for these benchmark problems at AIAA SciTech 2025. In this paper we compare the computational tools, methods, and results across these participants. In general, despite different modeling approaches and design parameterizations, the designs resulting from each participants' optimizations often achieved similar performance. However, significantly larger differences were observed in the optimized designs themselves. These differences stem from a multitude of choices made by participants in how they modeled the benchmark wing and solved the benchmark optimization problems. In particular, different approaches to modeling the stiffened panels of the wingbox resulted in significantly different structural designs. We end by discussing the most significant challenges and bottlenecks faced by participants.