Geez, where do I begin... :)

It's a fascinating problem and on very small engineering projects with a small team of people willing to experiment with new methods it would be great to try and take things in this direction and see what works.

The reality of how aircraft projects and pretty much any engineering project really, is undertaken is currently so far from lending itself well to this type of thinking it's not funny.

Best that can be done is to chip away at little sub problems at a time tyring to improve things.

In terms of CAD data, there is a shared workspace amongst the different teams around the world. You can see what everyone else is up to.

The problem is that 90% of what goes into that design is not something that lends it self easily to an optimisation problem of any kind. At least not without gathering a ton of metrics that are currently in various documents from the 40s, people's heads and difficult to quantify metrics like what manufacturing options are currently available, what things people already have experience at etc etc.

A huge part of engineering is almost black magic. It's peoples experiences and judgements.

Also, many things are not done by analysis because we don't understand all the factors involved fully, they are done based on emperical evidence of what worked in the past. This emprical data is spread all over the place in tables and documents or just some old timers brain.

Reducing much of it to an optimisation problem is an enormously difficult task.

Then there is the analysis side of things. This is where it could be more akin to programming and could be "solved" potentially.

However, the current processes involved in doing engineering analysis makes life difficult. Basically, hundreds or even thousands of engineers produce mountains of Excel spreadsheets, words docs, text files of data and hundreds of other formats that all relate to one another somehow to tell a story of whether the aircraft is safe to fly or not.

This is far from computer code where the variables all neatly reference one another and a computer can understand it. Picking through it and figuring out how the numbers in one file match the numbers in another is a nightmare at times. I do not envy the senior engineers that have to check it and sign their name on it to say it is correct.

As you say, if everyone was working in a common IDE to do this and forcing things to have relationships the world would be a much better place for engineers. The mountain that has to be climbed to get there in the aerospace industry is enormous however.

So that I don't sound like a complete skeptic though, there is hope!

On the design side, things are most simple early on in a project where people are working on the early conceptual designs. This is were the problems are simple enough that things can be solved. It's once the conceptual design is thrown out to the large engineering departments to fill in the millions of details that the trouble begins.

And on the analysis side, the world is moving toward more and more finite element analysis. This is basically the brute force approach to analysing a structure. This is where it is in machine readable form and optimisation is possible. However, the answers the computer gives you are always layered and compromised from the engineers looking over them and having to turn them into something that's actually practical, can be built and takes into account the many requirements the computer does not know about.