Exploiting the synergy between aircraft architecture and electric power system in unmanned aerial vehicle through many-objective optimization

This study addresses the preliminary design of a fixed-wing, tail sitter electric unmanned aerial vehicle (with vertical take-off and landing capability) by optimizing the size of the powertrain components together with the main aircraft design specification. To this scope, different optimization problems are considered, with two, three andd four objective functions, respectively. The results of the optimization are used not only to compare the performance of different optimization algorithms when increasing the number of goals, but also to discuss the synergy between architecture and power systems optimization.