Sonic boom annoyance is an important technical showstopper for commercial supersonic aircraft operations. Choosing the right aircraft shape reflecting the design requirements is a crucial step that is usually simplified in the early stages of design by resorting to a qualitative selection of a baseline configuration based on historical designs and designers bias. The shortcomings of traditional tools are overcome in this study. A diverse mix of tools is integrated to provide a simple, yet powerful procedure for sonic boom minimization. A shape optimization procedure for supersonic aircraft...