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AEROSPACE AND DEFENSE DIGITAL THREAD

Aerospace design

Bring an aircraft or rocket design to life faster with a multidisciplinary design and optimization approach. Enhance collaboration by breaking down silos among teams. Create a comprehensive digital twin to optimize designs. Use powerful simulation and optimization tools to iterate and innovate.

What is the role of MDO in aerospace design?

Multidisciplinary design and optimization (MDO) is a game-changing approach to spacecraft and aircraft design. It starts with a single source of truth on a digital backbone to connect all design teams, who then leverage a configuration-driven, multidisciplinary digital twin. Finally, industry-leading simulation tools facilitate validation of design performance and faster, iterative optimization.

Reimagine spacecraft and aircraft design

To create innovative designs while reducing cycle times, aerospace and defense companies need to rethink their aerospace design processes. A multidisciplinary design and optimization framework that breaks down siloes and increases collaboration among design disciplines can lead to powerful results:

35%

Increased fuel payload

Meet market demands for enhanced aircraft capabilities with a streamlined aircraft development process. (Piper)

90%

Reduced labor hours

Create an automated aircraft design framework that reduces product development time. (General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc.)

50%

Optimized overall design

Automate the design process to reduce analysis time by 30 to 50 percent. (Northrop Grumman)

Aerospace Design Solutions

Streamline aerospace design processes

Stay ahead of the competition with a multidisciplinary design and optimization approach that streamlines product development, enhances collaboration among teams, assesses manufacturability and optimizes overall design.

Explore our solution paths to take your aerospace design to the next level:

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Enable efficient collaboration by establishing an authoritative single source of truth among design teams. Today's aircraft and spacecraft are increasingly complex, making it more important than ever for teams to communicate effectively. Breaking down traditional silos between various disciplines such as electrical, electronic, mechanical and software allows teams to make better design decisions early on in the process.

Optimize your spacecraft and aircraft design strategy

25%

Reduced detailed structural design time

Increase collaboration among design teams, move faster and perform more detailed analyses earlier in the design process to reduce late-discovered issues. (General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc.)

66%

Reduced needed engineering staff

Reduce product development time while doing more iterations by capturing all parts of aircraft design and creating a seamless end-to-end process. (Bye Aerospace)

30-50%

Reduced analysis time

Accelerate spacecraft design with a multidisciplinary approach to design and optimization that balances mission attributes. (Northrop Grumman)

Case study

Northrop Grumman

Case Study

Automating the design space exploration process to reduce analysis time by 30 to 50 percent

Company:Northrop Grumman

Industry:Aerospace & defense

Location:Falls Church, Virginia, United States

Siemens Software:NX, Simcenter 3D Solutions, Teamcenter

Siemens has done a tremendous job bringing all these tools together into what is now the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. It is priceless that we can work in the digital realm with proper design analyses, close connections to the hardware we design and properly analyze and control mission requirements.
Dr. Tom Stoumbos, Simulation and Test Leader, Northrop Grumman
Transform aerospace design

Explore our resource library

Embrace digital transformation in aerospace product development to remain competitive. Connect all design disciplines in a single common environment to leverage a comprehensive digital twin and drive design innovation. Explore our resources to learn more about a multidisciplinary approach to aircraft and spacecraft design.

Game-changing solutions to boost your aerospace design

Software engineering

Mechanical product design

E/E systems development

Electronic systems design

Aerospace performance engineering

Product lifecycle management

Frequently asked questions

Successful aircraft development requires cross-disciplinary design teams to deal with huge amounts of change traffic while developing a product. Increasing productivity is chief among the competencies of any competitive aerospace and defense company. However, as A&D products have become more complex, the established tools for aerospace design are ready for their next iteration. It is here that Siemens Xcelerator brings a new and better collection of capabilities necessary to support high-performance design processes for multidisciplinary teams. These immersive, in-context design methods can be delivered efficiently through SaaS deployments. Driving automation in this manner ensures seamless awareness of all changes, spanning both upstream and downstream operations. Therefore, as the design becomes more fully optimized through the development cycle, all stakeholders are kept informed and can rapidly address potential impacts on their areas of design authority.

Enhancing productivity in key areas like design, manufacturing, simulation and service can decrease expenses for products with extended lifespans, like aerospace and defense products. A multidisciplinary design and optimization approach presents an opportunity to add more reliability to products, consequently lowering the manufacturer's lifecycle costs. By fully exploring the design space and simulating manufacturability and realistic in-service performance for key A&D product types, the likelihood of product failure or the need for service decreases, resulting in reduced time and labor spent on rectifying issues.

A key factor in creating competitive advantage in aerospace product development is the speed of engineering processes. How fast a company moves through the development cycle is tightly linked to market leadership through introducing new technology faster. A multidisciplinary design and optimization approach is central to these ends by supporting faster, more efficient product development in A&D. Our solutions support the creation of digital twins connected by digital threads. Digital twins are high-fidelity, reusable representations of a design, its manufacturing processes or manufacturing resources. They are quickly created, easily managed and simply modified through the lifecycle of the product. Digital threads connect these digital twins, enabling their reuse and consumption. This digitalization framework automates the collaboration and multidisciplinary optimization activities necessary to rapidly develop the high-performance products at target cost, thereby enhancing competitive advantage.

Aerospace and defense engineers face the difficult task of making informed decisions about complex, highly engineered products and the challenge of meeting business demands. Siemens Immersive Engineering offers a solution to this dilemma through a multidisciplinary engineering approach that utilizes a fully immersive engineering process to understand and reconcile the impacts of design choices on the fit, form, function and fabricability of a product.

In aerospace product development, the marriage of insight and process is essential. Innovation is undeniably important, but its potential can only be fully realized within a robust framework of efficient processes. Siemens aircraft design solutions embed a collaboration framework into the product development process, creating a holistic understanding across disciplines whether they be electrical, mechanical, software, systems or manufacturing. This allows A&D companies to put product development at the core of their business strategy, a proven approach to enhancing growth and profitability.

Thousands and thousands of pieces of information are generated during the development processes for A&D products. This information must be delivered accurately and completely through multiple revisions of designs to build end products. Often the tasks necessary to define and communicate this information are tedious and complex. In many cases, they are not automated, but this data must be efficiently reused in a series of optimization activities that cross disciplinary boundaries between electrical, mechanical, software, manufacturing and other teams.

Next-generation A&D products have reached a level of complexity that requires more advanced automation and optimization to achieve program and performance targets and meet sustainability goals. Siemens' digitalization capabilities enable the kind of multidisciplinary design and optimization activities that make these complex problems more tractable and sustainable.

Learn more

Watch

On-demand webinar | Adopting multidisciplinary design for integrated collaboration

On-demand webinar | How Northrop Grumman leverages Simcenter for space robotics success

On-demand webinar | AI's impact on A&D product development

Listen

Podcast | Natilus and immersive design

Podcast | Generative design for electrical systems

Podcast | The mechanical side of generative design

Read

Blog | Establishing a single source of truth for aerospace design

White paper | Leveraging multidisciplinary design and optimization to provide a comprehensive design solution

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