Using system engineering on an aircraft improvement project

Abstract

The C-17 is the mainstay in airlift in this new century. The incorporation of airdrop capability improvements was critically important. From defining requirements, engineering design, fabrication, assembly, flight test and retrofit to the field aircraft would have to be completed by the year of 2000. This presented a challenge to the integrated product team (IPT) organisations to achieve first-time quality under an accelerated schedule. Airdrop capability improvement was one of a few performance improvement projects to apply the complete systems engineering process. Development of team members understanding of systems engineering applications was necessary and added additional challenges to the systems engineering implementation. If the systems engineering process was not well executed by the entire team, the outcome would be viewed as a worthless activity.In summary, the challenges were: • A short time span of project design life cycle.• A first-time break-through implementation of full spectrum of systems engineering. • Team members learning systems engineering on the job during design phase. • Progressively understanding the customer requirements during design phase. REQUIREMENTSA timesaving technique to meet the accelerated schedule was the employment of a matrix for recording both requirements and verification methods. The requirements were allocated to the corresponding functions. The matrix is called requirements allocation sheet (RAS). ABSTRACTA complete system engineering process is applied to a pilot project that will determine the initial deployment of the system engineering process for future projects. It was a challenge to complete the entire systems engineering process to include project team utilisation of system engineering tools in such a short time span. Therefore, systems engineering products had to be useful and productive to the project. The system requirements definition, quality function deployment (QFD) evaluation, trade study, risk identification and risk mitigation processes were completed in a timely manner and assisted in the system eequirements, system design and preliminary design reviews successfully.

Which Design Methodologies Are Effective to Support a Capstone Project in Aerospace Design Engineering?

“…There is a plethora of design methodologies [4][5][6]14], so this paper tries to build in the suggestions of systematic engineering by Eder [12,15]. The combination of systematic engineering (systems engineering -SE) with Quality Function Deployment (QFD), and Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) is not a new attempt in the design engineering research community [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. Environment-based design (EBD) [24,25] is a systematic design methodology under research and development at Concordia University by Professor Yong Zeng.…”