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The projection of aeroelastic constraints in the design space has long been a want in the design process of vehicles. These properties are usually not established accurately until later phases of design. The desire is to bring another interactive constraint to the conceptual design phase and allow the designer to see the impact of design decisions on aeroelastic characteristics. Even though a number of analysis and optimization tools have been developed to support aeroelastic analysis and optimization in the flight vehicle design process, the toolbox is far from being complete. The results often cannot be obtained in a manner timely enough and the natural division of the engineering team into specialty groups is not supported very well by the aerodynamic-structures monolithic codes typically in the above toolbox. The monolithic codes are also not amenable to the use of concurrent processing now made available by computer technology.

New optimization methods that are intended as an improvement over traditional design methodology often require the design model itself to be developed in a nontraditional manner. This paper describes the tailoring of a supersonic business jet design model to the Bi-Level Integrated System Synthesis (BLISS) optimization method. Included is a brief discussion of BLISS, the development and implementation of the design model, application of the design constraints, and a survey of favorable results. For discussion purposes, the design model is ‘tailored’ to the optimization method, not vice versa, to illustrate the model’s unique development.