The demands posed on modern aircraft design encourages research into new tools and methodologies that allow the rapid generation of digital prototypes which can represent fundamentally different configurations. High-level design decisions are generally made within the conceptual design phase and require a solid understanding of the technology impacts on the overall aircraft system. This paper presents a recently developed, novel knowledge-based engineering framework, which allows for the transparent digitization of conceptual design knowledge and its interconnection using semantic-web technologies. It focuses on describing an effective structure for capturing and storing the expert’s knowledge and on the procedures required to analyse and solve the resulting complex system. By flexibly recombining the knowledge patterns concerning e.g. different propulsion architectures or lifting-surface configurations, the resulting system provides a significantly reduced effort to generate fundamentally different air vehicle configuration prototypes and allows for covering the vast design space typically considered during the conceptual design phase. The discussion is supported by examples for the automated creation of multi-trapezoidal lifting surfaces and the creation of different combat air vehicles architectures starting from the same knowledge base
