With an increasing complexity of systems, systematic design space exploration is required for fair analysis and comparison of architecture design options. However, there is still a need for a benchmark problem to support the development & evaluation of optimization algorithms and system architecture design space modeling methods, and to educate stakeholders in system architecture optimization. The thesis focus lies on the creation of such benchmark problem with an application to aircraft jet engine design, which is subsequently tackled by developing an MDO tool using a system architecting approach with mixed-discrete and multi-objective capabilities. The tool was built with the open-source software pyCycle and OpenMDAO and can generate, analyze and compare different aircraft engine architectures on several disciplines including engine thermodynamic cycle analysis, weight, geometry, emissions and noise. Therefore, it is able to tackle the black-box, mixed-discrete, multi-objective and hierarchical nature of system architecture optimization problems. ... Read more