Brief Description of the Project

The ID4CS project is an integrated design software aimed to model and simulate complex systems. ID4CS intends to address within a single framework, six important dimensions of today's real-world optimization problems:

• multi-level,
• multi-disciplinary,
• multi-search-method,
• multi-objective,
• multi-attribute,
• modeling under uncertainty.

In this context, the ID4CS project has the ambition to offer new methods and new tools to deal with all these dimensions.The ID4CS project will be applied to aircraft preliminary design and aircraft engine design case studies.

The challenge is to improve the design process of complex systems as well as robustness of the final product and thus, to reduce overall cost.The heart of ID4CS consists in a self-adaptive, distributed and open multi-agent architecture enabling the integration of the above-mentioned multi-dimensional aspects and distributing the optimization process inside the agents. All the elements work locally towards a collective process resolution while interacting cooperatively with their neighbor elements, using meta-information and while learning from experiences. ID4CS also requires that optimization tools and uncertainty know-hows will be encapsulated in agents and in meta-information used by the agents. The system and the designer co-design the system because ID4CS enables designer to interact with it during the design task.

The ID4CS project will concern industrial study offices that develop complex systems, by adding new improvements:

• All levels are considered in the same system, at the same design loop, which will enhance coherency and will fasten feedbacks; contrary to sequential life cycles classically used to design new complex products. Moreover, it will avoid concurrent works done by several teams without proper communication/coordination framework.
• The reduction of uncertainties will reduce development costs and will increase competitiveness, since the target product is more precisely defined.
• Designers will not have to wait for a complete solution before revising their choices (parameter values, uncertainties, etc.), but will be able to change at runtime some values as to constrain the system convergence.

ID4CS intends to be used by other application fields (than the use cases handled in the project) that require complexity by essence: aerospace, cars, information systems, etc.