Airframe Simulation Requirements
for
Aerospace Design 

Raymond R. Cosner 
Boeing Company - Phantom Works
St. Louis, MO

Aerospace design today is a global process.  Our team of customers, suppliers, and other participants is a 
worldwide team - and so is the team of our competitors.  Success will depend, in part, on our ability to 
integrate our worldwide team and use the best assets of this entire team to meet our customers needs with 
the most efficient and effective processes.   

One element of an efficient, effective process will be the degree to which it exploits advanced modeling 
and simulation in aerodynamic design, and in all other elements of the design process.  The aerodynamic 
design process requires large databases for many key tasks.  These databases may comprise up to 10,000 
discrete conditions - combinations of vehicle geometry state and flight conditions.  To improve the 
affordability of the process, CFD must gain ability to provide this type of database at an acceptable cost, 
cycle time, and confidence level.

To accomplish this goal, the CFD community must advance in several key respects:
? Improve the robustness and reliability of all elements of the CFD analysis process.
? Provide meaningful a priori estimates of the quality (uncertainty) in all predictions.
? Verify the quality (uncertainty) a posteriori of predictions by automated processes.
? Use quality estimates to build databases from a variety or prediction methods, with controlled 
uncertainty at minimum cost.
? Develop tools and procedures to manage distributed computing systems efficiently.
? Develop infrastructure tools to link legacy tools for combined, multi-disciplinary analyses across a 
distributed, heterogeneous network.
? Link this "computational grid" of integrated tools into existing desktop productivity systems, and into 
enterprise management information systems.
? Maintain the security of the data.

Success in these steps will be a very significant contribution to sustaining the superiority of American 
aerospace design in the first decade of the 21st century.  These steps will help create a low-cost design 
process that delivers innovative products to the world market with unrivaled speed.

(end)
  Summary of remarks presented at the DARPA System Environments Workshop, November 10-11, 1997.
  Senior Fellow.  Aerodynamic Design Technology Team Leader, Boeing - Phantom Works, St. Louis, MO.  Phone: 
(314) 233-6481, E-Mail: "raymond.r.cosner@boeing.com"