Value-driven Model-Based Optimization coupling Design-Manufacturing-Supply Chain in the Early Stages of Aircraft Development: Strategy and Preliminary Results

A value-driven model-based approach concurrently coupling design, manufacturing and supply chain in the early development stage of aircraft design has been developed within the European project AGILE4.0. The benefits of using this methodology have been highlighted by the aeronautical application case focused on the design, manufacturing and supply chain of an horizontal tail plane. Finding a Pareto-front simultaneously optimizing the design, manufacturing and supply chain domains is the next challenge to face. The research activity proposed in this paper represents the first step of this ambitious goal. The objective is to identify the optimization strategy to use for the global optimization campaign by exploring, first, simple and representative Multidisciplinary Design and Optimization (MDO) problems related to the supply chain domain. In the first MDO problem, a 4-objective optimization is executed and then the optimized attributes are aggregated in a single measure named value. In the second MDO problem instead, attributes are first aggregated in a value and then a bi- objective value-cost optimization is executed. Thus, two optimization strategies are investigated, but both lead to the value-cost Pareto-front investigation. The application case addressed in this research activity provides interesting insights for the value-driven optimization strategy to use for future-complex optimization problems involving design, manufacturing and supply chain domains.