Multifidelity optimization under uncertainty for a tailless aircraft

Abstract

This paper presents a multifidelity method for optimization under uncertainty for aerospace problems. In this work, the effectiveness of the method is demonstrated for the robust optimization of a tailless aircraft that is based on the Boeing Insitu ScanEagle. Aircraft design is often affected by uncertainties in manufacturing and operating conditions. Accounting for uncertainties during optimization ensures a robust design that is more likely to meet performance requirements. Designing robust systems can be computationally prohibitive due to the numerous evaluations of expensive-to-evaluate high-fidelity numerical models required to estimate system-level statistics at each optimization iteration. This work uses a multifidelity Monte Carlo approach to estimate the mean and the variance of the system outputs for robust optimization. The method uses control variates to exploit multiple fidelities and optimally allocates resources to different fidelities to minimize the variance in the estimates for a given budget. The results for the ScanEagle application show that the proposed multifidelity method achieves substantial speed-ups as compared to a regular Monte-Carlo-based robust optimization.