Streamlining cross-organisation product design in aeronautics

Abstract

Aircraft development programmes generally involve collaboration in engineering between different organisations, in order to develop innovative products efficiently, to involve necessary skills from the supply chain, and to spread risks and costs among the partners. The size and complexity of the programmes, the market demands and the contexts of competition all require the collaboration to be effective and efficient. Advances in information technology provide new capabilities to support collaborative design but a step change is needed to harness and coordinate this support to be effective and efficient. The extended enterprises in which the collaborative engineering activities take place span the partner organisations. Engineers wishing to cooperate are however facing security constraints. For example, technical security measures such as firewalls and proxy servers hamper smooth exchange of engineering data and seamless execution of collaborative workflows. The restrictions assist organisations in protecting their assets and in remaining compliant with legislation and regulations. From a programme technical point of view, effective and efficient collaboration in this world full of security and the resulting connectivity constraints is a major challenge. This paper describes the usefulness, necessity and challenges of collaboration between multi-disciplinary specialists in aerospace engineering. It presents the ‘Brics’ technology that supports the realisation of cross-organisation collaborative workflows. The technology supports aircraft manufacturers and their supply chains in facing the challenges and in performing analyses of innovative aircraft designs collaboratively. This technology has emerged from past research projects, and has been further developed and successfully demonstrated in the Thermal Overall Integrated Conception of Aircraft project, a research and technology development project carried out in the Seventh Framework Programme funded by the European Union. The developed technology is illustrated in the context of a multi-partner analysis and optimisation study, which has been conducted as part of a pylon design that is subject to thermal constraints.

CMDOWS: a proposed new standard to store and exchange MDO systems

“…Both platforms have been specifically augmented in these projects to enable the automatic generation of executable workflows based on the MDO solution strategy graph produced by KADMOS and InFoRMA [26,41]. Within AGILE the interoperability of cross-organizational tools (with access restrictions due to intellectual property) in the same executable workflow is supported by the Netherlands Aerospace Center (NLR) tool BRICS [42]. Schema operations library This category contains the collection of useful methods to inspect, check, or analyze the workflow schema file produced by the MDO system formulation applications.…”

“…A second type of tool repository is the SMR [42] developed by the NLR. In the SMR a collection of surrogate models is stored which can also be exported as a CMDOWS file.…”

A clustered and surrogate-based MDA use case for MDO scenarios in AGILE project

“…Both are deployed in AGILE to compose the main processes, as well as disciplinary sub-processes. The cross-organizational mechanism available in AGILE is Brics [24], developed by NLR. Brics provides technology for interconnecting PIDO environments.…”

Aircraft Geometry and Meshing with Common Language Schema CPACS for Variable-Fidelity MDO Applications

“…RCE makes it easy to set up an MDO workflow also with modules running on remote hosts. That is handled by the BRICS (Building blocks for mastering network Restrictions involved in Inter-organisational Collaborative engineering Solutions) [17] system, which supports remote execution and data transport. The request can be with "engineer in the loop" for a remote expert to run the calculation or for an automated workflow to be run without user intervention.…”