V-FIDES is a dual-use vehicle, able to absolve civilian and military applications, which allows to work either as Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) or as Remote Operated. Its applications in commercial, scientific and defense areas need high level design requirements to satisfy requested operating capabilities, energy efficiency, speed and maneuverability performances, etc. Operative missions require often performances hard to match: precise control and maneuvering, long endurance, wide volumes for payloads, minimum drag, etc. Due to its particular and ambitious requirements a complete design process, different technologies and methodologies are required for developing, building and operating the V-FIDES. To predict any potential performance into several mission scenarios is a technical challenge concerning the capability to simulate through a concurrent design procedure hydrodynamic and structural conditions. The concurrent engineering design methodology is based on an avant-garde Hybrid Design + Optimization Under Uncertainty approach, fully integrated within modeFRONTIER, multi-objective optimization environment; it incorporates several CAE tools and it allows to face the product development from the MDO (Multidisciplinary Optimization Methods) preliminary design to a Multiple-Criteria Decision Making, according to the main design requirements. Finally the results obtained by 3D numerical simulations exploiting the numerical platform are compared and verified with the experimental results on a real true scale prototype realized by WASS; the underwater vehicle is now ready to satisfy requests and needs of the market.
