Aircraft design with simulated annealing for sae aerodesign competition

The SAE Aero-Design competition aims to reward the aircraft with the best design and with the best performance. The performance is measured as the ratio between the lifted weight and the aircraft weight. This competition has grown in the last few years, as well the teams’ competitiveness; they are getting very close to reaching the perfect aircraft configuration. This research aims at determining an efficient methodology to get a competitive aircraft design and performance. Simulated annealing is applied as an optimization algorithm to determine such aircraft design. It is shown that the aircraft design can be represented by a parametric model. Before evaluating the aircraft design performance, it is necessary to check if the aircraft design obeys the competition constraints. If the constraints are not obeyed the aircraft design is invalid. Several parametric schemes can be used to represent the aircraft design. However, a key point is defining one parameter scheme in which few parametric models are invalid. Thus way, the domain search by the simulated annealing is more effective. An effective parametric scheme is proposed here and a simulated annealing with crystallization heuristic is used to determine an optimal aircraft design. Several results are shown and compared with other parametric schemes as well with Genetic Algorithm.