The ‘MOB’ project: towards methods to support e-design across Europe

The development of the MDO approach presented in this paper is based on extensive programmes of research undertaken in the aerospace sector. Some of this work has resulted from in-house development of systems to support the creation of actual production aircraft of which references (1) and (2) are typical examples. Other studies have focused on the development of methods to support the application of MDO using a variety of optimisation approaches mainly in the conceptual or early preliminary design phases (2–6) and in the opportunities provided by large scale computing (7). The most detailed application for a realistic aircraft component was undertaken in an earlier EU funded research programme (BE95-2056) reported in references (8,9) with potential developments of this work explored in (10). However, the concept of creating a system able to fully cover the total design process and to include the concept that the teams involved are distributed has not been previously considered and is the focus for the MOB project.