27th Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, 19 - 24 September 2010, Nice, France
Paper ICAS 2010-7.9.1 INVITED

SYSTEMS DESIGN AND MODELING: A VISUAL ANALYTICS APPROACH

D. N. Mavris, O. J. Pinon, D. F. Fullmer Jr.
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Keywords: systems design, visual analytics, surrogate modeling, physics-based modeling, probability theory

The process of designing unconventional aerospace vehicle configurations is characterized by a lack of relevant data, information, and knowledge, which prevents the designer from applying traditional design methods. To address this issue, significant amount of data need to be generated, collected, and analyzed to increase the designer’s knowledge about the physics of the problem and to explore the diverse spectrum of available design options. However, the amounts of data required to successfully pursue unconventional designs can rapidly become overwhelming, hence limiting the designer’s ability to fully comprehend the problem to be solved. This paper presents a multidisciplinary perspective termed Visual Analytics which can be applied to address these issues in the context of the pre-conceptual/conceptual design of unconventional configurations.

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