Design and Optimization of Very Light Jet Aircraft Incorporating Airworthiness Constraints

A conceptual design process, which considers airworthiness requirements is defined to develop a Very Light Jet aircraft, and an optimum aircraft configuration is designed. The proposed process consists of an initial-configuration design phase, an evaluation criteria elaboration phase, an application of airworthiness requirements phase, and an optimal configuration design phase. At initial configuration design phase, preliminary aircraft configurations are defined based on requirements analysis and conventional conceptual design process. After selecting evaluation criteria, weighting factor for each criterion is obtained using three different decision making methods, AHP, QFD and TOPSIS. Hence baseline configurations are derived. Design constraints from airworthiness requirements are selected by investigating aircraft safety requirement including Korean Airworthiness Standards (KAS), Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR). By carefully selecting the design variables through sensibility analysis, a multi-objective design optimization is performed. Hence, configuration with improved performance and cost are derived for various weighting factors.