Abstract: The rapid development of artificial intelligence has brought profound changes to structural optimization and additive manufacturing for aircraft structures. This development has made the collaborative integration of structural optimization and additive manufacturing an important research direction for design–manufacturing integration. Focusing on recent advances in artificial intelligence in this field, this paper systematically reviews key technical achievements from three aspects: structural design, additive manufacturing, and integrated design and manufacturing. In structural design, artificial intelligence has greatly improved the efficiency of aerodynamic shape generation and topology optimization, and has supported intelligent multi-objective optimization of complex configurations. In additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence has enabled intelligent process-parameter optimization, adaptive control of forming processes, and defect identification, while also supporting prediction of process–microstructure–property relationships. On this basis, this paper reviews the applications of artificial intelligence in typical scenarios, including thin-walled stiffened structures, channel structures, and lattice sandwich structures, and summarizes the research progress in material–process–microstructure–structure–function integrated design and manufacturing. Finally, the key challenges and future prospects of applying artificial intelligence to aircraft structural optimization and additive manufacturing are discussed.

Key words: aircraft structures, artificial intelligence, structural optimization, additive manufacturing, material–structure integration