Collaborative Engineering: An Airbus Case Study

Abstract

This document introduces the main concepts of Collaborative Engineering as a new methodology, procedures and tools to design and develop an aircraft, as Airbus Military is implementing. Airbus designs and industrializes aircrafts under Concurrent Engineering techniques since decades with success. The introduction of new PLM methodologies, procedures and tools, mainly in the industrialization areas, and the need to reduce time-to-market conducted Airbus Military to push the engineering teams to do things in a different way. Traditional Engineering works sequentially, Concurrent Engineering basically overlaps tasks between teams using maturity states and taking assuming risks. Collaborative Engineering promotes a single team to develop product, processes and resources from the conceptual phase to the start of the serial production. The deliverable of the team is an iDMU (industrial DMU), a complete definition and verification of the virtual manufacturing of the product.

Testing and verification through virtual product models: A survey and look ahead

“…An important part of these incentives is to provide facilities for the internal, virtual quality assurance, testing and verification of prototypes [14], [13], [6]. The first segment in which these incentives were formulated were the aerospace and automotive industries [15], [16], [17], in which companies developed a set of quality assurance procedures which were to be observed and applied by all actors of the product supply chain. However, the implementation of all of these procedures significantly increased the costs of individual suppliers, which reduced the incentives for further co-operation.…”

Enhancing the effectiveness of design tools in synthetic environments

“…For example, in addressing collaborative work at different time, the focus will be on the registration of generated information and making it available to others. Tools for the support of this type of operation range from extremely simple solutions, like white-boards to leave messages behind, to complex full-featured knowledge management systems (Mas, Menéndez et al, 2013). In any case, these systems boil down to off-line communication, for which a wealth of solutions is already available.…”

“…Xu, Wang, & Newman, 2011). In many research publications the focus is on changing the organisation in such a way that cooperation between different disciplines is stimulated and facilitated (Mas, Menéndez et al, 2013). In these organisations projects are carried out between people from different departments.…”

Metodología para la generación y evaluación multicriterio de soluciones conceptuales de diseño de líneas de montaje final de producto en el sector aeronáutico

“…Esto incluye tareas como la planificación de procesos, y la definición de la línea de montaje [2]- [6].…”

“…Se ha revisado metodologías desarrolladas para los problemas de ingeniería asociados, como la definición de la línea de montaje [9][10] [16][20] [21] o la planificación logística [6] [17]. Debido a la complejidad de cada problema, habitualmente se abordan por separado, aunque se ha encontrado propuestas en las que se integraban varios aspectos diferenciados del diseño de la industrialización, principalmente para definir la cadena de suministro o la red de distribución en conjunto con algún otro aspecto de la producción [44][51] [63].…”