Abstract: A waverider is a type of hypersonic lifting body that has the entire bow shock underneath the body as well as attached to the leading edge when flying at its design Mach number.Present research for improving the aerodynamic performance of waveriders mainly focused on searching an optimal profile of the leading edge on the condition of given a specific generating flow field.In order to further extend the design space of waveriders, a novel design method that is based on a local shape deformation technique is presented in this paper.Moreover, an inviscid analysis-based optimization study was carried out to research the effect of compression surface deformation on aerodynamic performances of waveriders by integrating the increment-based parameterization method, the computational fluid dynamic analysis, and the differential evolution algorithm.Afterwards, six selected waverider configurations were polished to blunt leading edges, and then their aerodynamic performances were evaluated by solving the Navier-Stokes equations.The results show that both the L/D and the relative pressure center coefficient of the waveriders produce significant changes with the variation of compression surface shape.Among all waveriders, the maximal difference of the L/D is more than double.Even by considering the lift constraint, the increment of the L/D is more than 14 percent in comparison with the baseline configuration.In addition, the value of relative migration of the relative pressure center coefficients is remarkable.