The Enabling of Product Information in the Conceptual Phase

As functional (total care) products emerge in aerospace business agreements, theactual product ownership often remains with the manufacturer. The business risk isthen transferred to the manufacturer therefore downstream knowledge needs to beavailable during the concept phase to consider all product life cycle aspects. The aimof this work is to study how a multidisciplinary design tool can be used to embeddownstream processes for conceptual design and evaluation, thereby allowingsimulation of life cycle properties. A knowledge enabled engineering approach wasused to capture the engineering activities for design and evaluation of jet enginecomponent flanges. For each design change, the cost of manufacturing operations,maintenance and performance aspects can be directly assessed. The design toolassures the performance of engineering activities according to company designspecification, creating a better control over the process quality. It also creates a betterunderstanding enabling the engineers to optimize the concept in real time from anoverall product life cycle view. The optimization of the total product system will bebased upon the new tool, which will not only be used between companies, but alsobetween product development departments in large global companies.