Multidisciplinary and Multi-objective Design Optimization for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle System

In modern wars, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm has been developed for cooperative engagements. To further improve the UAV swarm combat effectiveness, it is necessary to apply multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) for UAV system design considering the mission scenario. Based on the characteristics of UAVs, the UAV multidisciplinary analysis models are constructed including flight range, penetration, search, strike, and cost disciplines. The MDO problem is then formulated to maximize the effectiveness indexes (i.e., mission completion probability and flight range) and minimize the expenditure indexes (i.e., take-off weight and cost) simultaneously. Additionally, a surrogate-based multi-objective optimization method is utilized to solve the studied UAV MDO problem efficiently. Compared with the initial design, the optimized solution can save the cost and increase the flight range simultaneously, which demonstrates the effectiveness and practicality of the UAV multidisciplinary optimization work in this paper.