New safety model for the commercial human spaceflight industry

The aviation and space domains have safety guidelines and recommended practices for Design Organisations (DOs) and Operators alike. In terms of Aerospace DOs there are certification criteria to meet and to demonstrate compliance there are Advisory Circulars or Acceptable Means of Compliance to follow. Additionally there are guidelines such as Aerospace Recommended Practices (ARP), Military Standards (MIL-STD 882 series) and System Safety Handbooks to follow in order to identify and manage failure conditions. In terms of Operators there are FAA guidelines and a useful ARP that details many tools and techniques in understanding Operator Safety Risks. However there is currently no methodology for linking the DO and Operator safety efforts. In the space domain NASA have provided safety standards and guidelines to follow and also within Europe there are European Co-operation of Space Standardization (ECSS) to follow. Within the emerging Commercial Human Spaceflight Industry, the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation has provided hazard analysis guidelines. However all of these space domain safety documents are based on the existing aerospace methodology and once again, there is no link between the DO and Operator’s safety effort. This paper addresses the problematic issue and presents a coherent methodology of joining up the System Safety effort of the DOs to the Operator Safety Risk Management such that a ‘Total System’ approach is adopted. Part of the rationale is that the correct mitigation (control) can be applied within the correct place in the accident sequence. Also this contiguous approach ensures that the Operator is fully aware of the safety risks (at the accident level) and therefore has an appreciation of the Total System Risk. The authors of this paper contend that it is better practice to have a fully integrated safety model as opposed to disparate requirements or guidelines. Our methodology is firstly to review ‘best practice’ approaches from the aviation and space industries, and then to integrate these approaches into a contiguous safety model for the commercial human spaceflight industry

Linking design and manufacturing domains via web-based and enterprise integration technologies

The manufacturing industry faces many challenges such as reducing time-to-market and cutting costs. In order to meet these increasing demands, effective methods are need to support the early product development stages by bridging the gap of communicating early design ideas and the evaluation of manufacturing performance. This paper introduces methods of linking design and manufacturing domains using disparate technologies. The combined technologies include knowledge management supporting for product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, aggregate process planning systems, workflow management and data exchange formats. A case study has been used to demonstrate the use of these technologies, illustrated by adding manufacturing knowledge to generate alternative early process plan which are in turn used by an ERP system to obtain and optimise a rough-cut capacity plan

Large volume metrology technologies for the light controlled factory

In the Light Controlled Factory part-to-part assembly and reduced weight will be enabled through the use of predictive fitting processes; low cost high accuracy reconfigurable tooling will be made possible by active compensation; improved control will allow accurate robotic machining; and quality will be improved through the use of traceable uncertainty based quality control throughout the production system. A number of challenges must be overcome before this vision will be realized; 1) controlling industrial robots for accurate machining; 2) compensation of measurements for thermal expansion; 3) Compensation of measurements for refractive index changes; 4) development of Embedded Metrology Tooling for in-tooling measurement and active tooling compensation; and 5) development of Software for the Planning and Control of Integrated Metrology Networks based on Quality Control with Uncertainty Evaluation and control systems for predictive processes. This paper describes how these challenges are being addressed, in particular the central challenge of developing large volume measurement process models within an integrated dimensional variation management (IDVM) system

Experimental comparison of dynamic tracking performanceof iGPS and laser tracker

External metrology systems are increasingly being integrated with traditional industrial articulated robots, especially in the aerospace industries, to improve their absolute accuracy for precision operations such as drilling, machining and jigless assembly. While currently most of the metrology assisted robotics control systems are limited in their position update rate, such that the robot has to be stopped in order to receive a metrology coordinate update, some recent efforts are addressed toward controlling robots using real-time metrology data. The indoor GPS is one of the metrology systems that may be used to provide real-time 6DOF data to a robot controller. Even if there is a noteworthy literature dealing with the evaluation of iGPS performance, there is, however, a lack of literature on how well the iGPS performs under dynamic conditions. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of the dynamic measurement performance of the iGPS, tracking the trajectories of an industrial robot. The same experiment is also repeated using a laser tracker. Besides the experiment results presented, this paper also proposes a novel method for dynamic repeatability comparisons of tracking instrument

Review of industrial temperature measurement technologies and research priorities for the thermal characterisation of the factories of the future

As the largest source of dimensional measurement uncertainty, addressing the challenges of thermal variation is vital to ensure product and equipment integrity in the factories of the future. While it is possible to closely control room temperature, this is often not practical or economical to realise in all cases where inspection is required. This article reviews recent progress and trends in seven key commercially available industrial temperature measurement sensor technologies primarily in the range of 0 °C–50 °C for invasive, semi-invasive and non-invasive measurement. These sensors will ultimately be used to measure and model thermal variation in the assembly, test and integration environment. The intended applications for these technologies are presented alongside some consideration of measurement uncertainty requirements with regard to the thermal expansion of common materials. Research priorities are identified and discussed for each of the technologies as well as temperature measurement at large. Future developments are briefly discussed to provide some insight into which direction the development and application of temperature measurement technologies are likely to head

Advanced Tools and Technologies for Collaborative Product Development and Knowledge Management

The shortcomings of the current state-of-the-art in distributed / collaborative product development of engineering products from concept to production are: A lack of an integrated interface for the full spectrum of functions needed by complex conceptual design for manufacture and assembly; and management and re-use of concept design knowledge within an integrated design environment. Recommendations are given on the integration of these disparate technologies for the benefit of collaborative work teams to enable them to use a seamlessly integrated interface to develop, review, analyse and reuse engineering and manufacturing knowledge and models within the enterprise and the supply chain. A proposed methodology and a functional description of such a system is presented. The system utilises the Protégé-2000 expert system on top of the Windchill data management / collaboration software. International Standard for the Exchange of Product model data – STEP is to be used for machining feature definition

Knowledge-Enriched Product Data Management to Support Aggregate Process Planning

This paper is proposed a novel method to disperse manufacturing knowledge through the application of a Product Data Management (PDM) system. The intention of this new development is to support aggregate process planning during the early product development phases. The objective of the methodology is that manufacturing knowledge can be captured and reused within a distributed and collaborative environment. In addition, this paper also emphasises the way in which manufacturing knowledge can be encapsulated in a domain- specific ontology called ‘manufacturing know-how’. Its semantics can be translated through the application of web-based technologies so that it would enrich the value of manufacturing knowledge being managed and promote the sharing of that knowledge within a distributed and collaborative environment

The 9th International Conference on Digital Enterprise Technology – Intelligent Manufacturing in the Knowledge Economy Era

Digital Enterprise Technology (DET) is “the collection of systems and methods for the digital modelling, simulation and optimization of the collaborative product development, factory and manufacturing processes planning, along their lifecycle”. The main aim of DET 2016 is to provide an international forum for the exchange of leading edge scientific knowledge and industrial experiences, regarding the development, integration and applications of the various aspects of Digital Enterprise Technologies, in the global manufafturing of the knowledge economy era. The guiding idea of the conference is to find a common understanding of employing Digital Enterprise Technologies in the factories of the future, moving from automated, to flexible, digital, sustainable, smart and intelligent manufacturing

The Application of Web-based Technologies in Product Data Management and Manufacturing Systems Interoperability and Data Exchange

As the use of web-centric technology matures within the current market, one of the most widely used standardized data exchange formats is XML (Extensible Markup Language). This is due to the fact that XML-wrapped data can be used and understood by any application that is XML-enabled. This is one of the main factors this paper aims to exploit in order to tackle the problem of improving manufacturing product development in a distributed and collaborative environment within the World-Wide-Web. The objective of this paper is to investigate how XML and the proposed standard XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) can be used as the mediation for associating a commercially available Product Data Management (PDM) system and a manufacturing system, which consists of manufacturing and design domains. In particular, the focus of this paper is to emphasise the way in which systems interoperate and deliver data solutions to enterprise information challenges