Design Automation

2016

Situation

Goals

Faster time-to-market by shortening the design cycle, coping with steadily increasing product complexity, the reduction of development cost and intelligent and flexible production are the main buzzwords which address and characterize the urgent needs in today's high-tech industries subject to global competition.

While in the past many downstream human activities in engineering design and mass production have already been subject to automation and have been successfully substituted by robots or software, only little support is currently available for the engineer in the conceptual design phase(s).

Most more upstream human design activities (i.e. from the initial product idea until the creation of the digital models which represent the blueprint of the final product) still mainly rely on human labor and human change management.

Means

Graph-based design languages possess the potential to overcome these limitations by offering the design engineers a very flexible way to express the know-how about the design object and the design process.

Design object means hereby all aspects proper to the parts of a system or product, while design process means here all aspects of thought processes, compromises and intermediate decision making which occurs during the design process. Graph-based design languages offer automatic translation into all kinds of digital models, and, if properly designed, automatic compilation under a variety of topological and parametric variations of requirements and boundary conditions, thus leading to different product designs and know-how re-use in the conceptual design of complex engineering products such as aircrafts.

Project

In the context of an internal AIRBUS project for “Cabin & Cargo Engineering”, several use cases were conceived to explore the performance of the graph-based design language approach in a multi-disciplinary problem setting. They have been chosen to illustrate the following goals:

  • creation of an design language for aircraft cabin purposes (including class definitions, an executable, graphical and rule-based generation of a UML data model, a graphic data representation, parametric CAD models, and a packaging investigation)

  • description of ‘how-to’s’ and concept documentation (including coupling options to operational-functional modeling tools (e.g. Rhapsody), to external analysis programs (e.g. stress or thermal analysis), and further simulation, documentation and visualization tools (e.g. Saber, Excel, VR and Delmia)