Une conception pour une production efficace, une approche basée modèles

International audienceThe concept of simultaneous engineering has been used for several years in the industry. However, it rarely aims to think the design of the product and the design of its industrial system (the factory) together. In this paper, we address the need to have a global view of architectural design and manufacturing throughout the entire design process. More precisely, we define a model-based approach which makes it possible to evaluate the impact of a product design on its manufacturability. This approach constitutes a first step, in a long-term perspective, to consider several high-level industrial systems and product designs together and choose the one that gives the best performances.Le concept d'ingénierie simultanée est utilisé depuis plusieurs années dans l'industrie. Cependant, il vise rarement à penser ensemble la conception du produit et la conception de son système industriel (l'usine). Dans cet article, nous abordons la nécessité d'avoir une vision globale de la conception architecturale et de la fabrication tout au long du processus de conception. Plus précisément, nous définissons une approche basée sur un modèle qui permet d'évaluer l'impact de la conception d'un produit sur sa faisabilité. Cette approche constitue une première étape, dans une perspective à long terme, pour considérer ensemble plusieurs systèmes industriels de haut niveau et plusieurs conceptions de produits afin de choisir celui qui donne les meilleures performances

The need of diagrams based on Toulmin schema application: an aeronautical case study

In this article, Justification Diagrams are introduced for structuring evidence to support conclusions that are reached from results of simulation studies. An industrial application is used to illustrate the use of the Justification Diagrams. Adapted from the Toulmin schema, the aim of Justification Diagram is to define a comprehensive, auditable and shareable notation to explain the results, the input data, the assumptions made and the techniques applied, to construct a cogent conclusion. Further, the Justification Diagrams provide a visual representation of the argument that aims to corroborate the specified claims, or conclusions. A large part of this work is based on the application of the Justification Diagrams in the context of the European project, TOICA. The Justification Diagrams were used to structure all justifications that would be needed to convince an authority that a simulation process, and the associated results, upheld a particular conclusion. These diagrams are built concurrently in a product development process that accompanies the various stages of Verification and Validation (V&V) and where, for each design stage of V&V, argumentation is constructed by aggregating evidence and documents produced at this design stage

Impact assessment of design guidelines in the conceptual development of aircraft product architectures

Abstract The optimization of the assembly phase, in complex products, is a challenging phase and it need to be handled in the early phase of product development (i.e., conceptual design). Several methods have been developed to assess the assemblability of product at the conceptual design phase, however, the most critical aspect concerns the possibility to derive design guidelines starting from the results of assemblability analysis. In this context, the present work aims at defining a methodology able to retrieve design for assembly and installation guidelines starting from the analysis of a given product architecture at the conceptual design phase (loop-back of the design for assembly method). The developed method makes use of matrices and vectors to provide a list of design actions that affect the product assemblability including a ranking of their impacts on the final design. The methodology was used to retrieve and select design guidelines in the context of aircraft manufacturing. The case study (cabin equipping of commercial aircraft) provides interesting results in the identification and implementation of design guidelines to improve the aircraft architecture at the conceptual level

CONCEPTUAL DESIGN FOR ASSEMBLY IN AEROSPACE INDUSTRY: SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS OF MATHEMATICAL FRAMEWORK AND DESIGN PARAMETERS

AbstractOne of the most challenging activity in the engineering design process is the definition of a framework (model and parameters) for the characterization of specific processes such as installation and assembly. Aircraft system architectures are complex structures used to understand relation among elements (modules) inside an aircraft and its evaluation is one of the first activity since the conceptual design. The assessment of aircraft architectures, from the assembly perspective, requires parameter identification as well as the definition of the overall analysis framework (i.e., mathematical models, equations).The paper aims at the analysis of a mathematical framework (structure, equations and parameters) developed to assess the fit for assembly performances of aircraft system architectures by the mean of sensitivity analysis (One-Factor-At-Time method). The sensitivity analysis was performed on a complex engineering framework, i.e. the Conceptual Design for Assembly (CDfA) methodology, which is characterized by level, domains and attributes (parameters). A commercial aircraft cabin system was used as a case study to understand the use of different mathematical operators as well as the way to cluster attributes

Thinking aircraft design and its production system design together

In the design of complex objects, such as aircraft, the definition of the means of production usually begins after the definition of the product. In other words, the product specifications define the requirements for its production system (factory, assembly line, tools, etc.). The limitation of this approach is that the production system can inherit blocking constraints that might easily be removed by changing the design of the product. Moreover, designing an object on the basis that it will be manufactured as usual, without thinking about an associated means of production, does not allow us to take full advantage of new manufacturing means such as robotics or additive manufacturing. Indeed, these new means can open up new possibilities for aircraft design optimization while imposing constraints (like size of what can be printed, materials used, space for the robots, etc.). For all these reasons, it is necessary to integrate manufacturability as soon as possible in the development cycle and, in doing so, to have a holistic design approach

A Scheduling Tool for Bridging the Gap Between Aircraft Design and Aircraft Manufacturing

For aircraft manufacturers, the market demand in the nowadays aeronautical industry requires a high reactivity between teams in charge of the design of the aircraft and teams in charge of its production system. One way to increase this reactivity is to help the design architects understand the way the aircraft is produced together with the bottlenecks in the manufacturing process, and to help them evaluate the impact of a design modification on the production system. This paper addresses these two needs. We formally describe the scheduling problem considered, the algorithmic approaches developed, the implemented tool, and results obtained on data from a real production line of the Airbus A320 aircraft family