In order to accelerate the extensive Structural Analysis of the composite stiffened panels of A350 XWB Aircraft, Airbus engineers used the methodology based on surrogate modeling in MACROS, an easy-to-use process integration, design optimization and intellectual data analysis application developed by DATADVANCE, one of the major software developers in the domain of predictive modeling and multidisciplinary optimization.

"DATADVANCE is delighted to elaborate and see Airbus successfully implementing our MACROS-based methodology, which consists in building approximations, also called surrogate models, of the huge Airbus' PRESTO database of the mechanical strength criteria (reserve factors) values, used as constraints in structure optimization problem. These surrogate models were used instead of a database to perform thin composite plates strength analysis and full sizing process. The full size of all surrogate models built in MACROS is ten times smaller than the size of the database, and they are constructed in several seconds each, which allows to approximate the whole database in a very short time", — said Sergey Morozov, the CTO of DATADVANCE.

"Airbus stands at the leading edge of innovation in research and development. By performing the optimization using the automatically constructed accurate surrogate models as constraints, Airbus engineers manage to perform structural trade-off studies faster and more efficiently and to find more opportunities in the design of the future aircraft";, — said Stéphane Grihon, expert in structure optimization

Structural analysis of Airbus A350 XWB Aircraft was performed in the Airbus' common environment called ISAMI (Improved Structural Analysis through Multidisciplinary Integration), while the resulting data was stored in the PRESTO database. Both tools are built on Siemens PLM Software's LMS Samtech Caesam™ framework, which integrates over 400 Airbus engineering software tools, helping Airbus standardize structural analysis and simplify airworthiness certification. DATADVANCE and Airbus are currently working on integrating MACROS into PRESTO with the support of the LMS Samtech Caesam development team. The integrations will open the way to an industrial-scale usage of MACROS surrogate modeling techniques for composite aircraft structures optimization within Airbus.