UAM Design Space Exploration Framework with Embedded Version Control

Aircraft design has always been a complex and multidisciplinary process but designing urban air mobility (UAM) presents additional complexity and heightens interdisciplinary effects. The early stages of aircraft design are complex and present a large design space from which a good candidate design must be found that satisfies the top-level aircraft requirements. There have been many tools developed over the years to help explore this design space, including general frameworks like OpenMDAO. General optimization frameworks are useful tools that will likely be a part of any solution to UAM MDAO, but they are not well suited as framework for managing vehicle design and analysis. The framework developed under this effort will be explicitly design around UAM concepts, including multi-model vehicles. It will also be tightly integrated with a version control system to manage and track model development. And the software will be distributed as open-source software to enable community support and collaboration. The framework consists of two parts and a version control system. The first is a Study, which is saved as a JSON-based data structure. A Study contains information about vehicle definitions, optimizations and trade studies, and a solution sequence. The other piece is the Execution Engine that steps through a user-defined solution sequence and utilizes plugins to call external analysis tools. Finally, the framework has the ability to let the user define vehicle variants by means of a branching script. The branching script contains a series of functions each defining some aspects of a vehicle or study, and each variant is defined by a combination of these functions.

The framework developed under this effort is intended to be released as open-source software, which would be available to the DoD, NASA, industry, and academia. The framework can be of potential use to various rotorcraft research programs at the Aeromechanics Branch at NASA Ames Research Center, including (but not limited to) Urban Air Mobility and the Mars Helicopter Project. The framework developed under this effort is intended to be released as open-source software, which would be available to the DoD, NASA, industry, and academia. Any rotorcraft development program could benefit from its use.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

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