Provision of a Web Based Decision Support system for Wing Box Tooling

The ACES (Aerospace Cost Engineering Systems) team at UWE has been engaged in developing cost models to the aerospace industry for a number of years. These models range from large spreadsheet based tools to knowledge based systems. The work described in this paper attempts to address some of the issues that have emerged in creating costing tools in the past, namely: 1) Limited reusability of code/data 2) Lack of sophisticated data structures in spreadsheets 3) Provision of wide access to cost data/knowledge 4) Integration of a wide variety of code/data sources. The new system is intended for network use. The project uses the open architecture of the Internet to create a system of interacting objects. These objects communicate with systems such as CAD and Databases. This openness ensures that the software can be improved in an evolutionary way. This paper describes the status of the project.