MADEsmart: An environment for improved development of aircraft components in preliminary design

The MADEsmart Project represents a unique contribution to the Defense Advan ced Research Project Agency's (DARPA) Rapid Design Exploration and Optimiza tion (RaDEO) Program and to U.S. industrial aircraft design practice. The p roject team's work focused heavily on the introduction of design and manufa cturing constraint information early in the product development lifecycle. Since conventional aircraft development efforts are highly inefficient for identifying and managing product requirements and design constraints, a dev elopment team's ability to effectively evaluate proposed design solutions c an be negatively impacted. This project's work employed three main technolo gies to accomplish its vision of greatly improving the design of aircraft c omponents: (1) intelligent agent technology to streamline coordination betw een development team resources: (2) Multidisciplinary Design Optimization ( MDO) technology to allow for rapid design exploration and optimization; and (3) the introduction of design evaluation for manufacturing process constr aints at the preliminary stage of design using a natural language processin g representation known as Lexical Conceptual Structures (LCS). This paper p rovides motivation for the MADEsmart project's research, an overview of eac h of its three main focus areas. a more detailed description of each of the technology applications, and some concluding remarks.