Mission-Driven Inverse Design of Blended Wing Body Aircraft with Machine Learning

The intent of this work was to investigate the feasibility of developing machine learning models for calculating values of airplane configuration design variables when provided time-series, mission-informed performance data. Shallow artificial neural networks were developed, trained, and tested using data pertaining to the blended wing body (BWB) class of aerospace vehicles. Configuration design parameters were varied using a Latin-hypercube sampling scheme. These data were used by a parametric-based BWB configuration generator to create unique BWBs. Performance for each configuration was obtained via a performance estimation tool. Training and testing of neural networks was conducted using a K-fold cross-validation scheme. A random forest approach was used to determine the values of predicted configuration design variables when evaluating neural network accuracy across a blended wing body vehicle survey. The results demonstrated the viability of leveraging neural networks in mission-dependent, inverse design of blended wing bodies. In particular, feed-forward, shallow neural network architectures yielded significantly better predictive accuracy than cascade-forward architectures. Furthermore, for both architectures, increasing the number of neurons in the hidden layer increased the prediction accuracy of configuration design variables by at least 80%.