Multidisciplinary Aerospace Research Code (MARC) is a successor to SUAVE developed by Dr. Matthew Clarke and co. at Stanford University. It is an open-source, python-based platform for designing, analyzing, and optimizing conventional passenger, drone, supersonic, and all/hybrid-electric aircraft.

Philosophy

MARC is developed upon the principle of continuously building upon previously validated work to reduce latency in the design process. It can be therefore thought of as a computational test bench for you to push the barriers of one or many disciplines within aerospace with reassurance that other aspects or analyses required to perform full systems analyses will be covered. 

Code Highlights

Extensive validation and verification (V&V)

Built upon the trust of a userbase over 5000, from academia to industry

Hands-on tutorials for learning with very gradual learning curve

 Plent documentation - developed with code readability in mind without sacrificing efficiency

Download

Jump in and design! Here are some helpful steps for downloading and installing the code. There are stable releases and beta releases. MARC is released with the permissive LGPL 2.1 license.

Getting Started

The development of MARC is handled through GitHub, a code-hosting platform for version control and collaboration. We have provided helpful information for getting started with the platform as well as some suggestions for maximizing productivity during coding and debugging. Learn more about the code structure and how to navigate and contributed to the code here.

Tutorials

With any software package, the learning curve can be steep. As a result, we have provided a collection of tutorials utilizing many of the capabilities of the code. Our hope is that these will be the launch pad for you to do your own aircraft analyses!

External Software Packages 

MARC contains several wrappers with external software to assist with visualization, analysis, and optimization. The links below can be used to navigate to installation instructions for these packages.

• OpenVSP (Vehicle Rendering)

• AVL (Aerodynamic & Stability Analysis)

• SNOPT (Optimization)

• Paraview (Results Visualization)