Multidisciplinary design for uninhabited air vehicles

Contemporary product design and process development is based on an iterative specify-evaluate-revise approach which is often time-intensive and therein non-responsive to customer needs. The engineering of a product incorporates numerous stages, involving conceptual through to detailed design. For small quantities or lot sizes (1-25 parts), the product design and process planning steps account for an inordinate share of the overall development cycle. An integrated geometric, performance analysis and materials processing evaluation environment for concurrent, multidisciplinary design is needed to not only address design-through-production efficiencies and costs but to enable more responsive product development cycles. The environment should enable the user to interactively evaluate alternative designs, not only of individual components or subsystems but combinatorial alternatives varying in materials, performance envelopes and sizing. All of these issues are particularly relevant to a new class of aircraft, an uninhabited air vehicle (UAV), which is unique in terms of its mission and its vehicle life, environmental constraints and components through system reliability and maintainability