The Common Parametric Aircraft Configuration Schema (CPACS) is a data definition for the air transportation system. CPACS enables engineers to exchange information between their tools. It is therefore a driver for multi-disciplinary and multi-fidelity design in distributed environments. CPACS describes the characteristics of aircraft, rotorcraft, engines, climate impact, fleets and mission in a structured, hierarchical manner. Not only product but also process information is stored in CPACS. The process information helps in setting up workflows for analysis modules. Due to the fact that CPACS follows a central model approach, the number of interfaces is reduced to a minimum.

The online documentation of the current development status can be viewed at this link. Further documentation of the official releases can be found at cpacs.de.

The CPACS homepage contains information about new developments, releases and other related projects. Checkout the available content at www.cpacs.de.

Have a look at our first tutorial video for CPACS. It explains how to create a wing in CPACS. Thanks to Till and Erwin for their work!

Further information about the CPACS development is available here.

CPACS is available as Open Source and we encourage anyone to make use of it. If you are applying CPACS in a scientific environment and publish any related work, please cite the following article:

M. Alder, E. Moerland, J. Jepsen and B. Nagel. Recent Advances in Establishing a Common Language for Aircraft Design with CPACS. Aerospace Europe Conference 2020, Bordeaux, France, 2020.

For more publications concerning CPACS, we provide the following link to Google Scholar.