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

Chantiers et matériaux de construction

Les quinze communications regroupées dans cet ouvrage confrontent les données provenant des sites archéologiques à celles tirées de chantiers spécialisés dans l’expérimentation de la construction et dans la restauration de monuments. Dans le domaine de l’archéologie du bâti, la lecture des vestiges conduit à la déconstruction mentale des élévations afin de restituer les phases d’occupation d’un bâtiment. Elle consiste aussi à distinguer les étapes de construction inhérentes à tout chantier, quels que soient les périodes et les lieux, en Orient comme en Occident. Il s’agit donc d’adopter une méthode d’analyse régressive pour renseigner les périodes anciennes à partir d’exemples récents de chantiers bien documentés. Si la notion de progrès existe à travers l’évolution de la science et des techniques modernes, le chantier médiéval de construction du château de Guédelon permet, par l’expérimentation, de retrouver des savoir-faire hérités du passé