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The preliminary design of a jet aircraft wing, through the use of an integrated multidisciplinary design environment, is presented in this paper. A framework for parametric studies of wing structures has been developed on the basis of a multilevel distributed analysis architecture with a "hybrid strategy" process that is able to perform deterministic optimizations and tradeoff studies simultaneously. The particular feature of the proposed multilevel optimization architecture is that it can use different set of variables, defined expressly for each level, in a multi-level scheme using "low fidelity" and "high fidelity" models, as well as surrogate models. The prototype of the design environment has been developed using both commercial codes and in-house tools and it can be implemented in a geographically distributed and heterogeneous IT context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]