UTOPIAE · Uncertainty Treatment and OPtimisation In Aerospace Engineering

Uncertainty Treatment and OPtimisation In Aerospace Engineering

UTOPIAE looked for the ideal compromise between performance and resilience, optimality and reliability in complex engineering systems and, by embracing the inherent stochasticity of Nature, it used optimisation to harness reliability and robustness into a better future. In an expanding world with limited resources, UTOPIAE developed solutions for a more sustainable and resilient future addressing some of the global challenges for sustainable development and the objectives of Europe in the areas of Transport, Advanced Manufacturing & Processing, and Space. The high level objectives were: To define and develop sets of multi-fidelity models covering key applications in space and aerospace. To look into the most general representation of uncertainty and develop techniques to reduce the computational cost to quantify uncertainty. To study optimal techniques to design new experiments, improve the robustness of the numerical simulation and validate the simulation models. To develop algorithms and methods for worst-case and multi-level optimisation and new techniques for handling expensive many-objective optimisation problems with mixed discrete and continuous decision variables. To make Evidence-Based Robust Optimisation (EBRO) efficient in high dimensional problems and develop new techniques for large scale constrained Reliability Based Design Optimisation (RBDO) problems. To use optimisation under uncertainty to optimise multi-phase processes with evolvable requirements, constraints and performance metrics. UTOPIAE achieved all its objectives by developing new algorithms and mathematical theories that enable the creation of the engineering systems of the future. The immediate impact was to support major aerospace companies like Airbus and Leonardo to design and manufacture safer and better airplanes. The methods developed in UTOPIAE have already been applied to the design of future space missions and have found their way into the design of new medical delivery systems with drones.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union