A multidisciplinary design and analysis environment and its application to aircraft flight dynamics analysis

Complex engineering problems have to be jointly solved by many disciplinary teams with multitudinous computational software packages and physical experiment systems. Thus, the efficiency and effectiveness of solving complex engineering problems largely depend on effective collaboration among specialist engineers, seamless integration of disparate cyber-physical systems, and transparent interoperations of heterogeneous data sources. This paper presents a multidisciplinary design and analysis (MDA) environment in conjunction with its application to aircraft flight dynamics analyses. The MDA infrastructure builds a cybernetic platform that integrates structure analysis and flow computation systems with wind tunnel experiment systems; reconciles and interoperates diverse data sources generated by the cyber-physical systems. It is demonstrated that application of the MDA environment cost-effectively enhances work efficiency, team collaboration, and solution optimality in aircraft flight dynamics engineering processes.