AMADEVS: A Generalized Aircraft Modeling & Analysis Environment for Multidisciplinary Design

Recent advances in aircraft development have led to the emergence of diverse vehicle configurations—including multiple eVTOL concepts, tailsitters, and strut-braced wings—together with increasingly complex propulsion and power architectures such as electric, fuel-cell, hybrid, and distributed propulsion systems. This diversity creates a growing need for a flexible modeling environment that can define arbitrary aircraft systems in the early design phase and support multidisciplinary analyses in a unified manner. However, most existing tools are built around specific configuration or propulsion assumptions, limiting their applicability to unconventional designs. This paper proposes AMADEVS (Advanced Modeling, Analysis & Design Environment for Vehicle Systems), a generalized aircraft analysis and design environment that addresses these limitations. AMADEVS integrates role-based component definitions with a dual-topology representation of geometry and energy flow, enabling intuitive construction of a wide range of configurations and propulsion architectures. It further provides a unified structure in which aerodynamic, propulsion, flight-dynamics & control, and mission analyses are performed sequentially on a single aircraft model, eliminating the fragmented workflows typical of traditional tools. Through these architectural properties, it functions not only as an analysis and design tool but also as a framework-builder capable of supporting independent analysis and design frameworks tailored to diverse objectives. To demonstrate the generality and extensibility of the proposed architecture, this paper introduces representative AMADEVS-based design frameworks and presents three application studies: sizing of a Mars helicopter, wing design under propeller–wing interaction, and handling-qualities analysis of a UAM quadcopter. These examples show that problems with distinct physical characteristics and design requirements can be addressed using the same modeling principles, illustrating AMADEVS’s potential as a general and extensible development platform for next-generation aircraft design.