Automated evaluation of performance, certification and maintenance aspects of aircraft on-board system architectures during preliminary design stages

On-board systems are key for the correct and safe operation of the aircraft. They constitute a significant part of an aircraft having a remarkable impact on performance since they directly affect the aircraft mass and fuel consumption. Their impact goes beyond when considering also other stages of the aircraft life cycle. On-board system architectures are defined during early design stages and have a huge impact on the final product. They are characterized by the different subsystems, components and connections among them. The total amount of possible feasible architectures for a system is huge, which usually leads to a big architectural design space. Automation is hence required in order to properly explore such design space. This study aims at providing a methodology to assess performance, maintenance and certification aspects of on-board system architectures during early stages of design. The proposed methodology allows to evaluate innovative on-board systems architectures, connecting in an automated manner their design space model to a multi-objective and multi-disciplinary evaluation framework. Such framework manages to filter out the architectures that are not preliminary certifiable before they are further evaluated, this narrows down the huge architectural design space and saves computational time as a result. An example with the roll control function of a flight control system is shown to better understand the scope and capabilities of the presented methodology. Results show that the proper filtering of the design space successfully identifies the most promising architectures and reveals interesting trade-offs. This supports the engineer during the decision making process of on-board systems design.