A number of existing and emerging concepts for formulating methodologies applicable to automatic inverse design and optimization of arbitrary realistic three-dimensional aerodynamic configurations have been surveyed and compared. An attempt was made to classify the methods and to expose their major advantages and disadvantages. The existing flow-field analysis codes were found to be useful integral parts of all techniques surveyed. The methods for inverse aerodynamic shape design were found to be a potentially useful integral part of the general shape optimization. Similarly, different optimization and convergence acceleration algorithms were found to be potentially useful integral parts of the control theory (adjoint operator) based concepts that seem to be the most promising overall approach to the shape design optimization.
