Aircraft Design Markup Language for Multidisciplinary Aircraft Design and Analysis

Layne T. Watson

Abstract

The process of conceptual aircraft design has advanced tremendously in the past few decades due to rapidly developing computer technology. Today’s modern aerospace systems exhibit strong interdisciplinary coupling and require a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach. Efficient transfer, sharing, and manipulation of aircraft design and analysis data in such a collaborative environment demand a formal, structured representation of data. Extensible markup language, which is a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation, is one such standard concomitant with a number of powerful capabilities that alleviate interoperability issues in a collaborative environment. A compact, generic, and comprehensive extensible markup language schema for an aircraft design markup language is proposed here to represent aircraft conceptual design and analysis data. The purpose of this unified data format is to provide a common language for data communication and to improve efficiency and productivity within a multidisciplinary, collaborative aircraft design environment. An important feature of the proposed schema is the very expressive and efficient low-level schemata (raw data, mathematical objects, and basic geometry). As a proof of concept, the schema is used to encode an entire Convair B58. The reduction in effort (gain in value) to exchange data models and analysis results in the aircraft design markup language increases with the complexity of models and the number of disciplines.