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

Progress in the interpretation of near-field optics

International audienc

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