Aircraft designers strive to achieve optimal weight-reliability tradeoffs
while designing an aircraft. Since aircraft wing skins account for more than
fifty percent of their structural weight, aircraft wings must be designed with
utmost care and attention in terms of material types and thickness
configurations. In particular, the selection of thickness at each location of
the aircraft wing skin is the most consequential task for aircraft designers.
To accomplish this, we present discrete mathematical programming models to
obtain optimal thicknesses either to minimize weight or to maximize
reliability. We present theoretical results for the decomposition of these
discrete mathematical programming models to reduce computer memory requirements
and facilitate the use of dynamic programming for design purposes. In particular,
a decomposed version of the weight minimization problem is solved for an
aircraft wing with thirty locations (or panels) and fourteen thickness choices
for each location to yield an optimal minimum weight design.
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