Automated packing and piping in an Airbus A320 main landing gear bay: an industrial development case study

Abstract

The packing of given hydraulic equipment together with the hydraulic piping is a challenging design task. Both the hydraulic domain and the geometry domain are highly intercoupled as the packing determines the exact location of the connection points and tangents for the pipes but also defines the installation spaces for the equipment to be positioned which needs to be taken into account as an obstacle during the piping process. For the industrial case study, a mounting rack in an Airbus A320 main landing gear bay is used, where seven pieces of equipment should be packed and 22 pipes should be routed. In the first part of the study, the packing was done manually, assisted by automated routing, while the hydraulic piping was generated automatically. In the second part of the study the packing was automatized as well. For the automated packing process, a particle multi swarm optimisation was used. As objective function a pipe length minimization was implemented, which uses the Dubins Path as a pipe approximation. Constraints taken into account are the collision-free nature of the equipment and its placement on a plate inside the plates borders. The automated packing workflow was used to generate different variants of which for two a pipe work was generated exemplarily. Due to the model-based systems engineering approach, no further interaction in terms of the definition of the connection points, tangents and the installation space is necessary. This demonstrates that an automated packing and piping process in an industrial context using industrial geometries is now feasible.