Intelligent Distributed Mismatch Control for European Aerospace Industry

1 INTRODUCTION One of the key challenges for Europe is to maintain and develop the European Aerospace sector as a world competitive industry. The European Commission has fostered several collaborative research initiatives in aeronautics yielding a number of successful projects. In the Fifth Framework Programme of the EC the financial support dedicated to the Aerospace industry alone is set to euro 700 million. For many years the design and manufacture of major European aerospace products has been distributed across the continent; Airbus and EFA being typical examples. What makes cooperation amongst partners of the European aerospace sector more challenging is the fact that the design process tends to be sequential and requires centralised planning teams and a great deal of travel on the part of the distributed designers. Distributed Design and Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) techniques promise to resolve most of the difficulties above by replacing the paper and tape and physical meetings based methods by electronic communication and electronic meetings and provide a basis for Concurrent Engineering (CE) environment [17][19][22]. all other attributes of the product ". In this paper we focus on one aspect of the distributed design process and Concurrent Engineering support: design consistency checking during the assembly stage. The design for assembly, as part of the CE process, is one of the most important issues, because the design of large–complex products for automotive or aerospace industry is not possible without using modern sophisticated tools for full support of the virtual mock-up process. In this context, it is very important to analyse current software for a virtual –mock up process. Some of the main tools are presented below: dV/MockUp [9] is a family of tools for Interactive Product Simulation-the process by which design and manufacturing companies can study the form, fit and function of their products. Tecoplan Automatic Design Verification (ADV)[2] automatically uncovers all collisions and violations of minimum distances during the early design phase. ADV based on Tecoplan's formal model name Tecoplan's Space Management. Another commercial systems such as CATIA [8] and IDEAS [13] do provide facilities for assembly mismatch control, but their approaches are more focussed on the tolerances. The commercial Virtual Mock-up systems mentioned above are very powerful tools. However, current virtual mock-up software, in general, does not have facilities for detecting and resolving design mismatches. The systems can detect geometric inconsistencies based on syntax level, but have no capability of advising how …