A major challenge in the transport sector is to make economic growth compatible with sustainability and environmental constraints, while remaining competitive and innovative. The development of aeronautical products is a complex multidisciplinary process with requirements and constraints on the air transport system as a whole, the aircraft, and all the individual components to be produced. A major challenge impeding an efficient and cost-effective design processes is the integration of the various levels of the aeronautical supply chain. Therefore, the aeronautical industry needs to connect all the people, skills and technologies involved in its collaborative, multi-national and cross organizational processes, by means of a digital representation of production systems, supply chains, and seamless operations across diverse disciplines, during the entire life-cycle of the product. The high level objective of AGILE 4.0 is to bring significant reductions in aircraft development costs and time-to-market through

The challenge for Clean Sky 2's Large Passenger Aircraft Programme is to further mature and validate key technologies such as advanced wings and empennages design, making use of hybrid laminar airflow wing developments, as well as an all-new next generation fuselage cabin and cockpit-navigation.

The Airframe ITD aims at re-thinking and developing the technologies as building blocks and the “solution space” on the level of the entire or holistic aircraft: pushing aerodynamics across new frontiers, combining and integrating new materials and structural techniques – and integrating innovative new controls and propulsion architectures with the airframe; and optimizing this against the challenges of weight, cost, life-cycle impact and durability.