Engineering complexity associated with developing new aircraft requires new ways of thinking in design and manufacture.
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Written by: Dale Tutt, Vice President of Aerospace and Defense Industry, Siemens Digital Industries Software
These are, indeed, historic times for the aerospace and defense (A&D) industry. We’re seeing new levels of innovation and disruption at every turn. Established big-name players, along with numerous start-ups, are making history on a weekly basis. Perhaps most striking are the recent space launches by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. Space travel and exploration are no longer the sole province of big government agencies.
Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is also making news. Companies such as Joby Aviation, Volocopter and Archer are quickly becoming everyday names. No question, the promise of a faster, safer and more environmentally friendly way to move about is quickly approaching. Major commercial airlines in the United States have already claimed their share of the UAM market.
Among all this promise, the industry is facing numerous manufacturing challenges. Engineering complexity associated with developing these new aircraft—including more conventional aircraft—requires new ways of thinking in design and manufacture. And while we’re at it, we also need to find new and more efficient ways to sustain an aircraft across its lengthy lifetime.
With so much innovation, it makes sense to consider the trends dominating the industry:
- Increased pressure to reduce costs, improve cycle time and boost product quality.
- The need for organizations to be more agile in order to accommodate last-minute design changes and/or customizations.
- More demand to better manage and utilize capital-intensive manufacturing resources on the factory floor.
- Globalization is changing how companies compete on a global scale and collaborate between multiple locations, internally and externally.
Along with these trends, there is a significant movement toward digital transformation. When I’m visiting customers, I often hear “But how do I, as a company, incorporate automation or a more digitalized process into my manufacturing production line to address these trends?” That’s a very real concern. Nowadays it’s critical to have the capability to verify numerous changes or customizations made throughout the product lifecycle, to ensure the “as-built” matches the “as-designed” specs as the product rolls off the production line.
Many manufacturing processes in place today can no longer keep up with the increased levels of product complexity we are now seeing.
The Growing Demand for a New Approach
The manufacturing process has always been at the receiving end of a very long process; everything flows down to final production. In many respects, manufacturing has been an area slow to change because companies can ill-afford the smallest of disruptions. Most companies still take a traditional approach to manufacturing. In fact, many still employ the traditional document-centric approach, which is a manual process that’s linear, slow and tedious. Characteristic of this approach are documents passed among team members and teams outside the main manufacturing facility. Inevitably, this leads to team members working in isolation (not only because of documents, but the type of software one team uses may not be compatible with the software another team is using).
Other problems with the traditional approach include extreme difficulty when executing a change order or trying to incorporate options or customization – especially late in the product lifecycle. Today’s greater design complexity tends to lead to greater manufacturing complexity, often increasing problems during production. This creates extra and/or unexpected rework, resulting in increased cost and schedule delays. It’s also just too difficult to determine the cost of design change when it occurs mid-stream.
The situation is forcing OEMs to rethink their manufacturing processes. With the promise of UAM vehicles dotting the sky, serious product ramp-ups and mass production will be required.
The Path Forward: A Closed-Loop Manufacturing Process
How are A&D companies supposed to accelerate product ramp-up, exceed quality targets, accommodate last-minute changes and deliver products faster? This can be achieved by introducing a closed-loop manufacturing process as part of the digital transformation that many A&D companies are now embracing. The closed-loop process, often referred to as “digital manufacturing” includes a comprehensive digital twin of production and a specialized digital thread. This closed-loop process also leverages the best of what Industry 4.0 has to offer.
The Digital Twin of Production
Within the closed-loop process, the digital twin of production examines not only how a product is going to be manufactured, but it also creates a digital twin of the entire manufacturing and sustainment operation. The production digital twin simulates facilities and the factory floor, how technicians interact with one another, how machines and/or manufacturing cells interact and predicts how material equipment can move around a facility or between facilities.
Understanding how manufacturing sustainment operations are executed and how a product is performing in the field drives engineering and manufacturing improvements, allowing companies to focus on throughput capacity to optimize how facilities operate. Manufacturing can be further optimized via the digital twin by introducing flexible automation, which optimizes the entire design and manufacturing process.
The Digital Thread
Products today are smarter and more integrated. Organizations need to develop manufacturing processes and multiple manufacturing and assembly technologies to bring together structural parts, electrical and mechanical systems parts, composites, printed circuit boards and more.
The digital thread in manufacturing takes the build process and turns it into a multi-domain description of how a product comes to life by sharing data and communicating directly to all domains or disciplines involved in that product’s development lifecycle (Fig. 1). This digital thread enables organizations to visualize a process and understand the risks before the build process begins. Problems can be identified before millions of dollars are invested in automation, tooling and facilities. This same digital approach can be used to verify, certify and improve product reliability.
It must be said that digitalization is not just about managing data up and down the product lifecycle; it is much more than that. In a digitalized manufacturing environment, teams can tie any type of deficiency back to engineering or process planning. It closes that loop between what the team is doing and how the product is performing—which in turn, can only improve performance, maintenance and manufacturing operations for future runs.
How Intelligent Manufacturing Improves Manufacturing Quality
Intelligent manufacturing is a closed-loop process that introduces a flexible approach to digital manufacturing. Not only does it introduce automation, but it represents the digital factory of the future. This type of approach is more aligned to what companies require today when building UAM vehicles, electric/hybrid aircraft and space exploration vehicles, along with the more conventional aircraft for aerospace and defense.
A few of the high-level advantages to intelligent manufacturing include:
- Flexible automation for faster line flows: The ability to quickly evaluate different concepts through simulation means users are not building physical mock-ups; they are leveraging the digital twin. This transforms how a company perceives its manufacturing processes and can help teams move faster when starting up a production line.
- Up and down digital collaboration between manufacturing and design domains – extending into product support: Teams can shift processes to the left, allowing users to evaluate their manufacturing processes at the same time they are designing products. This brings that voice of manufacturing further to the left in the design process.
- Connecting PLM to Manufacturing Execution System (MES): Teams can manage a very complex A&D product with a digital thread that connects engineering to all production processes. The production digital twin and digital thread cover the full lifecycle of engineering to manufacturing, improving rate ramp-up and overall quality. First-pass yield and scrap rate are also greatly improved.
- Introduces additive manufacturing (AM) as a revolutionary force: AM revolutionizes how we build parts and assemblies, and dramatically changes how we’ll design those parts. Additive is a technology that enables new materials and new products of the future. Lessons learned such as design implementation, analysis and production methods provide the foundation to accelerate adoption of new materials and manufacturing methods in the future.
- Brings augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to factory of the future: With AR on the factory floor, teams can replace 2D work instructions with 3D augmented reality. Not only can AR be used on the factory floor, but it can be implemented in smart wearables to free-up technicians from having to manage paper documents.
- Virtual commissioning: I cannot emphasize enough the importance of virtual commissioning within intelligent manufacturing. It can have huge implications when planning a new production line or facility. Virtual commissioning can be leveraged to simulate manufacturing processes in a virtual factory setting to estimate the impact and cost of a design change or general setback – and reduce the propensity of risk during production.
The bottom line: intelligent manufacturing orchestrates the entire production process and brings relevant production data to every aspect of program development. It proves concept viability of products by including manufacturing feasibility analyses through simulation early in the design process. It validates production readiness with detailed manufacturing planning and virtual commissioning and incorporates design changes quickly to the factory floor (Fig. 2).
The Future of A&D Powered by Digital Transformation
The Siemens Xcelerator portfolio seamlessly connects engineering and manufacturing domains. The Xcelerator portfolio is fueling the digital transformation for companies both large and small. The key here is Siemens’ comprehensive digital twin and intelligent manufacturing digital thread which enable customers to achieve true concurrent engineering in a highly collaborative manner.
Intelligent manufacturing is the foundation of where the industry is headed. Siemens has the technology and experience to help you transition to a more digitalized manufacturing approach, an approach built specifically around your needs and the software you use today. We are at the cusp of something monumental in the industry, and it is my wish that we all share in the innovation and success destined to come.
We talk about the factory of the future, but it’s time to take advantage right now. It’s here today.
Learn more at Siemens Digital Industries Software.
About the Author
Dale Tutt is the Vice President of Aerospace and Defense Industry for Siemens Digital Industries Software. He is responsible for defining the overall Aerospace and Defense industry strategy for Siemens Digital Industries Software, driving specific industry requirements into solutions for Aerospace and Defense customers. Dale has over 30 years of experience in engineering design, development and program leadership within the Aerospace industry
