  Reduction in aircraft emission is a main driver for the development of more
efficient aircraft and enabling technologies are reaching operational maturity.
Aircraft manufacturers need an efficient product development process to capture
these emergent technologies and develop new aircraft concepts in order to stay
competitive. Presently, the aircraft development process is cross
organizational, and harnesses distributed, heterogeneous knowledge and
expertise. Large scale multidisciplinary studies, involving disciplinary
experts and specific tools are required to evaluate different aircraft
concepts. These MultiDisciplinary Aircraft Optimization (MDAO) processes are
difficult to deploy as they involve cross-organizational collaboration and
harmonization of processes, tools and even vocabulary. Moreover, difficulties
in collaborative decision making, reconfiguration and integration of new
requirements and competencies often precludes the development of an optimal
solution within the available time. To address these challenges, the AGILE
project is an effort within the European Union funded Horizon 2020 project to
reduce aircraft development time by developing tools and processes that enable
efficient, collaborative aircraft design. This paper presents the work
performed as part of the AGILE academy challenge where students were tasked
with developing and solving an aircraft MDAO problem using the AGILE toolchain.
Each team consisted of students from various universities around the globe and
had expertise in multiple design domains. An MDAO study is presented that
utilizes the AGILE toolchain to investigate the feasibility of implementing an
auxiliary solar power system on a baseline aircraft. The steps performed are:
(1) definition of a multidisciplinary design problem, (2) development of
collaborative workflow and (3) optimization using surrogate models. Through the
case study, a novel technology concept is investigated and the efficacy of the
AGILE toolchain in facilitating a MDAO is analyzed.
