Use Cases

The product development processes to be improved have a typical Non-Recurring Phase of about three years and associated costs of 75 million euro per project. The processes are governed by engineering methods like Systems Engineering (SE) and Concurrent Eng ineering (CE) that supplement the general industrial project and program management standards. The Design and Development (D&D) logic behind SE and CE will be used as the baseline in this project and progressed to a D&D logic for High Performance Engineering.

Three main products will be used to drive the IDEaliSM project on a case-based approach. The first one is design and manufacture of aero-structures for aircraft, the second is design and manufacture of wire harnesses for civil and military aircraft and the third use case is the design of an automotive cockpit centred on a wire harness:

All three use cases involve a multidisciplinary and high-tech product and feature tier 1 suppliers that deliver their products to mayor OEMs worldwide and are supported by a diversity of existing COTS and in-house developed IT solutions. Within use case 1 of this project the challenge of aircraft design is addressed as a guideline for the development of modern IT frameworks, regardless if it concerns overall configuration or configuration at component or subcomponent level. Part A, provided by Airbus Defence & Space, deals with the task of aircraft configuration finding and optimisation based on top level requirements. Within Part B Fokker Aerostructures and IDEC guide the investigation of the possibility to drastically reduce lead time and costs by using advanced IT technology. The work will use a typical thermoplastic rudder as an example to guide the research. For Fokker ELMO its Configuration Management and Generative Design Engines are a Key Technology. To maintain the market position this Key Technology needs to be drastically improved. This will be the subject of use case 2. The third use case will be guided by DRÄXLMAIER to evaluate the feasibility of substantially accelerated automotive cockpit design and manufacturing using advanced IT. The focus is on the customization of DRÄXLMAIER’s core competences to match the stringent formats and requirements on product data as su pplied. For establishing a digital wiring cable harness development process, models for the characterisation of harness components are required. Fraunhofer LBF will develop and validate numerical models for the characterization of such harness components in order to validate harnesses without physical prototypes. DRÄXLMAIER will produce and test wiring harnesses and cable bundles to characterize the mechanical behaviour. The mechanical behaviour of the harness will be predicted efficiently and reliably using the simulation results.