Unconventional aircraft configurations are considered as potential solutions to achieve the ambitious emission reduction goals in aviation. However, the identification, selection, and synergetic combination of promising technologies remain a highly vague and uncertain process. This has been addressed in the framework for the advanced morphological approach (FAMA), which represents a structured design process for the generation and evaluation of unconventional aircraft configurations. It implies the decomposition of the task into subproblems, their analysis and the synthesis of concepts in a solution space. This general workflow has been further developed and adapted on three levels in aircraft design: (1) the qualitative idea generation; (2) the semi-quantitative concept selection from the generated ideas; and (3) the probabilistic estimation of design parameters and figures of merit for the most promising concepts from the previous level. The current paper focuses on the overview of the finalized methodology as well as levels one and two, while level three will be presented in more detail in future work. The first level is demonstrated on the concept generation for regional aerial transportation. The second level results in the percentual performance comparisons of promising technologies for the design of an energy-efficient long-range aircraft.
Todorov et al. (Wed,) studied this question.