Robust Optimization of Aircraft Life-cycle Costs Including the Cost of Community Noise

The paper presents an extension of a formulation for life-cycle-costs-based MDO-CD (Multi-Disciplinary Optimization for Conceptual Design) of aircraft configurations for civil aviation, to take into account the stochastic variation of probabilistic parameters. Specifically, in the formulation used, the community noise is included in the optimization process as a cost. This cost depends a lot, for instance, upon government regulation and community perception, and hence is not necessarily determined when one is performing all the conceptual design computations. Thus, in the formulation presented, the cost of noise is used as a probabilistic design parameter and the optimal design is evaluated as that which minimize the expected value of the aircraft life-cycle-cost. In this preliminary work, the noise produced by the aircraft is evaluated using a simple Noise-Power-Distance model and included in the optimization process. A description of the technique used to estimate the community-noise impact on the life-cycle cost of the aircraft is presented. Applications to the optimization of an aircraft of the A320 category are shown.