28,902 research outputs found
Design Within Complex Environments: Collaborative Engineering in the Aerospace Industry
The design and the industrialization of an aircraft, a major component, or
an aerostructure is a complex process. An aircraft like the Airbus A400M is composed
of about 700,000 parts (excluding standard parts). The parts are assembled
into aerostructures and major components, which are designed and manufactured in
several countries all over the world. The introduction of new Product Lifecycle
Management (PLM) methodologies, procedures and tools, and the need to reduce
time-to-market, led Airbus Military to pursue new working methods to deal with
complexity. Collaborative Engineering promotes teamwork to develop product, processes
and resources from the conceptual phase to the start of the serial production.
This paper introduces the main concepts of Collaborative Engineering as a new
methodology, procedures and tools to design and develop an aircraft, as Airbus
Military is implementing. To make a Proof of Concept (PoC), a pilot project,
CALIPSOneo, was launched to support the functional and industrial design process
of a medium size aerostructure. The aim is to implement the industrial Digital
Mock-Up (iDMU) concept and its exploitation to create shop fl oor documentation
Value Chain: From iDMU to Shopfloor Documentation of Aeronautical Assemblies
Competition in the aerospace manufacturing companies has led them
to continuously improve the efficiency of their processes from the conceptual
phase to the start of production and during operation phase, providing services to
clients. PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) is an end-to-end business solution
which aims to provide an environment of information about the product and
related processes available to the whole enterprise throughout the productâs lifecycle.
Airbus designs and industrializes aircrafts using Concurrent Engineering
methods since decades. The introduction of new PLM methods, procedures and
tools, and the need to improve processes efficiency and reduce time-to-market,
led Airbus to pursue the Collaborative Engineering method. Processes efficiency
is also impacted by the variety of systems existing within Airbus. Interoperability
rises as a solution to eliminate inefficiencies due to information exchange and
transformations and it also provides a way to discover and reuse existing information.
The ARIADNE project (Value chain: from iDMU to shopfloor documentation
of aeronautical assemblies) was launched to support the industrialization
process of an aerostructure by implementing the industrial Digital Mock-Up
(iDMU) concept in a Collaborative Engineering framework. Interoperability
becomes an important research workpackage in ARIADNE to exploit and reuse
the information contained in the iDMU and to create the shop floor documentation.
This paper presents the context, the conceptual approach, the methodology
adopted and preliminary results of the project
Mapping customer needs to engineering characteristics: an aerospace perspective for conceptual design
Designing complex engineering systems, such as an aircraft or an aero-engine, is immensely challenging. Formal Systems Engineering (SE) practices are widely used in the aerospace industry throughout the overall design process to minimise the overall design effort, corrective re-work, and ultimately overall development and manufacturing costs. Incorporating the needs and requirements from customers and other stakeholders into the conceptual and early design process is vital for the success and viability of any development programme. This paper presents a formal methodology, the Value-Driven Design (VDD) methodology that has been developed for collaborative and iterative use in the Extended Enterprise (EE) within the aerospace industry, and that has been applied using the Concept Design Analysis (CODA) method to map captured Customer Needs (CNs) into Engineering Characteristics (ECs) and to model an overall âdesign meritâ metric to be used in design assessments, sensitivity analyses, and engineering design optimisation studies. Two different case studies with increasing complexity are presented to elucidate the application areas of the CODA method in the context of the VDD methodology for the EE within the aerospace secto
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