Formalization of design procedures in the engineer's educational strategy

Abstract

Abstract-During the last seven years Samara State Aerospace University performs an educational strategy for engineers and masters programs in aircraft engineering. The goal of the strategy is to formalize procedures and operations within airplane designing activities, in particular, the preliminary airplane design. The ultimate goal of the strategy is to create an automated system that would be able to generate a preliminary design project for an airplane based on the given technical specification for the project.The whole complex of standard design procedures, necessary to create an airplane, is carefully examined in order to achieve this goal. A domain thesaurus is being created as an integrative basis for the system. The system itself is based on a database of parameterized CAD models. It consists of a number of CAD models of different airplane parts, such as wing, fuselage, empennage, etc., for different types of airplanes and different design approaches. During the design process, the models are elaborated according to the chosen design scenario. The design scenarios are chosen based on their applicability for a particular task. If none of the existing scenarios is applicable, a new one is developed.An interactive interface for the designing support system is being developed to demonstrate the decisions, made during the designing process and also to give an operator ability to interfere if necessary.Students are involved in this program on the later years of their education, as it is a part of their graduation work. Each individual task is assigned to one of two students. All students, involved in the project, must cooperate with each other as their ultimate goal is to combine their effort into a single informational system. After completion of the individual goals, masters students prepare papers for specialized scientific conferences and, later, their masters thesis.The paper summarizes the experience in airplane designer's education carried out with support of modern informational systems, programming languages, data and knowledge bases.