Application of Optimization in the Early Stages of Product Development, Using a Small UAV Case Study

Innovative product development involves a lot of tools, methods, and approaches to create a better product faster and satisfying customer’s need. Two wide spread approaches are Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). However, there are not many software tools, combining methodologies PLM MBSE; one can mention LMS System Synthesis software, now is actively developing. It is used to create system models which include functional models able to describe system behavior in multiphysics domain. Therefore, when the system model of a product is multidisciplinary it’s not obvious what the parameters values describe the optimal state of the system. For these reasons, it is vital to apply multidisciplinary optimization techniques with the specific tools to calculate appropriate parameters of the developed system in the early stages of product development. This research is devoted to different optimization tools application, such as pSeven and Optimus Noesis, to the numerical models constituting digital twin for a small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The results of this research, specifically formulation of the optimization problems, detailed numerical models and the calculations results, are presented in this paper. The main idea is that optimization should be applied not as additional tool for separate numerical models, but one has to apply it as a powerful means along with PLM and MBSE tools in order to ensure that the product will meet all requirements and reduce time-to-market.