A method for optimizing a shape of a physical object using a free-form deformation technique, the method comprising the steps of: - obtaining an initial data representation of the shape of the physical object, wherein the initial data representation comprises point coordinates obtained from a surface point cloud of the digitalized physical object or a mesh originating from an aerodynamic computer simulation, - obtaining a reference data representation of the shape of the physical object, wherein the reference data representation comprises representative point coordinates (P i) of the initial data representation, - generating a grid of control points for the initial data representation by returning a control point configuration having the highest measure for structure robustness (E COVOL) in a set of control point configurations, - optimizing the shape of the physical object by a shape morphing algorithm using the free-form deformation technique based on the returned control point grid, - returning a data representation of the optimized shape for the physical object, and wherein the measure for structure robustness (E COVOL) for a control point configuration (x 1, x 2, x 3, x 4) is calculated by determining representative control points (x 2, x 3) of the initial control point grid, embedding the reference data representation into the control point grid by mapping each point coordinate (P 1) of the reference data representation to a spline parameter space of the control point grid, modifying positions of the representative control points (x 2, x 3) to obtain a plurality of modified control point configurations, for each modified control point configuration, calculating a shape variant of the reference data representation (P 1a) by free-form deformation using the modified control point configuration to obtain an updated data representation (P 1a*), and determining a similarity between the updated data representation (P 1a*) and the reference data representation (P 1a) by calculating a distance of point coordinates of the updated and the initial data representation, and returning the number of modified control point configurations for which the distance is smaller than the threshold (ε) as the value of the measure for structure robustness (E COVOL). - obtaining an initial data representation of the shape of the physical object, wherein the initial data representation comprises point coordinates obtained from a surface point cloud of the digitalized physical object or a mesh originating from an aerodynamic computer simulation, - obtaining a reference data representation of the shape of the physical object, wherein the reference data representation comprises representative point coordinates (P i) of the initial data representation, - generating a grid of control points for the initial data representation by returning a control point configuration having the highest measure for structure robustness (E COVOL) in a set of control point configurations, - optimizing the shape of the physical object by a shape morphing algorithm using the free-form deformation technique based on the returned control point grid, - returning a data representation of the optimized shape for the physical object, and wherein the measure for structure robustness (E COVOL) for a control point configuration (x 1, x 2, x 3, x 4) is calculated by determining representative control points (x 2, x 3) of the initial control point grid, embedding the reference data representation into the control point grid by mapping each point coordinate (P 1) of the reference data representation to a spline parameter space of the control point grid, modifying positions of the representative control points (x 2, x 3) to obtain a plurality of modified control point configurations, for each modified control point configuration, calculating a shape variant of the reference data representation (P 1a) by free-form deformation using the modified control point configuration to obtain an updated data representation (P 1a*), and determining a similarity between the updated data representation (P 1a*) and the reference data representation (P 1a) by calculating a distance of point coordinates of the updated and the initial data representation, and returning the number of modified control point configurations for which the distance is smaller than the threshold (ε) as the value of the measure for structure robustness (E COVOL).