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Keywords
Decision making, Aerodynamics, Aeroplanes, Aerospace industry, Aerospace transport
Abstract
Industrial designers often need decision-making methods to develop innovative solutions combining specified customer's requirements with project technical constraints. This paper describes a matrix approach as a technique to support system designer since the early stages of development, when many and important decisions must be taken. In this work, the matrix method has been used to analyze the civil unmanned aerial vehicle potential market and particularly for selecting the most promising applications of a multi-role rotary wing unmanned aerial vehicle. According to the matrix results, two rotary wing multi-role missions have been chosen as most promising customer attractive applications. This matrix method can also be improved for subsequent decision-making in preliminary-configuration analysis since it can be easily tailored to different specific engineering applications.
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Acronyms
ATC/ATM = air traffic control/air traffic management
CAPECON = civil UAV applications and economic effectiveness of potential CONfiguration solutions
DLR = Deutches Zentrum für Luft-und-Raumfahrt
EC = eurocopter
ECD = eurocopter Deutschland GmbH
NLR = National Lucht-en Ruimtevaartlaboratorium
ONERA = Office National d'Etude et de Recherches Aerospatiales
QFD = quality function deployment
RWUAV = rotary wing unmanned aerial vehicle
TOPSIS = technique for ordering preference by similarity to ideal solution
UAV = unmanned aerial vehicle
UNIBO = University of Bologna
1. Introduction
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) capable of autonomous or remote controlled flight and real time telemetry transmission, have been used in the past years over a wide range of military missions. Nevertheless, UAVs may represent a promising and cost-effective alternative to manned aircraft for a large number of civil aviation applications, too. Compared to traditional air vehicles, UAVs may offer significant advantages in terms of human safety (especially in dull, dirty and dangerous missions), operational cost reduction and work rate efficiency. Agricultural spreading, territory monitoring, environmental and border surveillance, police operation, highway traffic control, surveillance of dangerous or contaminated areas seem to be the most promising applications for remote controlled air vehicles, since they can ensure a continuous area coverage for even more than 24 h. A single operator at the ground control...