Approach for Coupled MBSE and MDAO for Military Transports

Aerospace systems are highly complex, often requiring many years of development and vast amounts of funding to be successfully designed. This work focuses on solving these issues by defining a scalable, integrated process between a Model-Based Systems Engineering database and a Multidisciplinary Design, Analysis, and Optimization (MDAO) architecture that minimizes manual data transfer, enabling early-stage validation of requirements, architectures, and design choices, thereby reducing the risk of error and the overall development costs of a complex system. To demonstrate this integrated process, systems models of a tactical mobility vehicle were created in SysML, connected to a separate MDAO team’s software through a custom parser, and the results were fed into a design space exploration dashboard. Through the integrated MBSE-MDAO process, we were able to easily and quickly identify stringent and flexible requirements, adjust design parameters, and find an optimal design solution to our example problem.