OpenMDAO
Off Design improvements and renaming of design vs summary mission variables
Desired capability or behavior.
The off design mission analysis currently instantiates a whole new aviary problem object and re-runs the entirety of the pre-mission block. This is not really necessary (particularly for subsystem masses) which are not expected to change from the initial design mission. Since all these parameters are recalculated the aircraft is basically being re-designed (although if everything is correct it re-designs to be identical to the sizing aircraft). We might want to refactor the code to avoid these extra calculations. We should also consider the multi-mission architecture and look for ways to align off design with it since there is some similarity in output.
Regardless of the above we currently have 'design' and 'summary' mission variables, which are not always consistently named and perhaps we should change 'summary' to 'as-flown' or 'mission1,2,3 etc' (open to other suggestions) to make it much clearer to the user what the summary variables are actually doing. Not all variables have a 'summary' version (e.g. operating weight, zero fuel weight). Some variables are named differently between design and summary (e.g. mission.summary.TOTAL_FUEL_MASS vs mission.design.fuel mass vs mission.design.fuel_mass_required which I think are actually all identical for a sizing mission...?). We should standardize all of these so that a user can easily use the same code to interrogate both a sizing and off design problem object.
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
No response
Associated Bug Report
No response
From our latest discussions on this topic, the current proposal is to move Mission.Design values to Aircraft.Design where it makes sense, and remove the "Summary" subcategory so things like Mission.Summary.GROSS_MASS simplify to Mission.GROSS_MASS
