Modeling and Simulation (M&S) is seen as a means to mitigate the difficulties associated with increased system complexity, integration, and cross-couplings effects encountered during development of aircraft subsystems. As a consequence, knowledge of model validity is necessary for taking robust and justified design decisions. This paper presents a method for using coverage metrics to formulate an optimal model validation strategy. Three fundamentally different and industrially relevant use-cases are presented. The first use-case entails the successive identification of validation settings, and the second considers the simultaneous identification of n validation settings. The latter of these two use-cases is finally expanded to incorporate a secondary model-based objective to the optimization problem in a third use-case. The approach presented is designed to be scalable and generic to models of industrially relevant complexity. As a result, selecting experiments for validation is done objectively with little required manual effort.