CONCURRENT ENGINEERING DEVELOPMENT AND
PRACTICES FOR AIRCRAFT DESIGN AT AIRBUS
Thierry Pardessus
Airbus, Vice President Design Methods and Deployment
Keywords: concurrent engineering, processes, methods, design, aeronautics
Abstract
Reduction of cycles (development time, series lead time) and costs along the aircraft lifecycle is a permanent priority. Concurrent engineering aims at enabling this reduction, by putting together in a multidisciplinary way of working all the relevant skills contributing to product engineering, and by setting and managing the operational conditions for work in parallel.
It is mainly a question of processes and way of working. For maximum business benefit, its implementation requires a strong sponsorship at top level, and discipline throughout the organizations, in order to define and fully apply common processes and common methods, supported by common tools.
The Digital Mock-up (DMU) becomes the heart of the product information. It is created with the support of Computer Aided Design (CAD) and is managed by a Product Data Management (PDM) system that also supports the industrial drawing release process and configuration management.
Practical operations in concurrent engineering lead to significant business benefits, which can be measured in terms of lead-time and reduction of effort in development. These benefits have now been made visible for the development of the A340-500 and A340-600, and for the A380.
As a vision, Airbus expects further integration steps in the design office technology, targeting a Virtual Aircraft, with stronger links between Systems Engineering (including Architectural Design and Requirement Based Engineering), Design to Decision Objectives around the DMU, and supported by the PDM.
1 Business context and programmes requirements
1.1 About large aircraft
A completed commercial aircraft is in many was the cimpromise of the know ledge, experience and creativity of the numerous engineers involved in an aircraft manufacturers ‘multidisciplinary design and production groups. But it must be also essentially the smaet response to requirements coming from ever more demanding Customers, as well as from airworthiness authorities. These requirements cover safety, product aircraft performance and operational characteristics, customization, and associated response time, acquisition costs, operating and maintenance costs, environmwntal requirements, and others. From the business side, competition is fierce, and Airbus’ approach is to offer permanently world class products and services which set the industry’s standards.
just to fix ideas the definition of the A380 is composed of a set of about 1000000drawing, which is dramatically much bigger than the number of drawings of the A340. The functional architecture of the system is broken down into about 70 major system, leading to several hundreds of pieces of equipment. All these definition information and data have to be managed carefully to ensure full traceability of the definition of a given aircraft against its customer's contractual requirements. This is the objective of configuration management.