Right first time for the Airbus A380

PTC, the engineering software company, has been at the heart of the development of the Airbus A380, the world's largest passenger aeroplane, unveiled on January 18th in France. With the unveiling, Airbus is now entering full-scale production for the A380. To be the market leader in the commercial aircraft industry and to develop a completely new product development model for this immense programme, Airbus needed to leverage the resources and innovation resident in its heritage companies and to achieve radical reductions in cost and time-to-market. The biggest impediment to these improvements was the difficulty in enabling the thousands of Airbus engineers spread across Europe, separated by different processes, systems, companies and languages, to concurrently engineer and manufacture a highly integrated system such as the A380. Airbus' answer to these challenges was an initiative called Airbus Concurrent Engineering or ACE, a systematic approach to aircraft development using best-in-class tools, methods and organisation in a Virtual Configured 3D environment. It was first implemented at Airbus on the A340 programme and is now being used intensively for the A380 and A400M programmes. Benefits of digital mock ups A key element of ACE is PTC's Windchill Technology, which synchronises the Complex Configuration Management module with the system digital mock up (DMU), allowing designs to be reviewed, simulated and shared, entirely virtually, right across Europe in a detailed and realistic 3D space. Engineers and manufacturers can now work simultaneously across the functions, disciplines and individual companies to build the DMUs, using a variety of configured views from the mock up. Then they are able to define manufacturing planning and finally release design solutions for manufacturing and assembly. Those views are used at every step of the aircraft's development, including pre-sales, maintenance and support. DMUs help to better integrate customer requirements into the design process, improve the quality of assembly definition and allow for early validation of the manufacturing processes themselves. Gorden Falk, vice-president, cabin interior, Airbus says: "Cabins are installed one month before we hand over the aircraft to the customer and if there's an issue that needs to be addressed we don't have much time to solve it. With Windchill, we can iron out any problems before we get to that stage." And he adds: "The beauty of it is that we are able to tap into the design and engineering know-how from all of the national entities. There's a lot of talent out there and for the first time we are all working with the same system and using the same processes and language." The benefits of DMU are the reliability, reactivity and important savings it has brought, especially with non-recurring costs. "Through our integrated processes we are now able to manufacture parts in a low range of tolerance from the geometric definition, which means they will fit together. This has worked particularly well on the A380, where the larger parts are fitting together first time without the need for any touching up," says Falk. PTC's Windchill DMU also makes change and customisation management easier, and helps in assessing aircraft maintainability and in defining maintenance operations. The DMU has already been used for detecting potential problems in A340 cabins and is being used extensively on the A380. Airbus currently has over 3,000 CADDS5 users and 6,000-plus PTC Windchill users. Key benefits

• Better integration of customer requirements in the design process, through visualisation and validation
• All problems resolved before production phase, despite system and process differences
• Significant savings as manufactured parts fit together without touching up
• Engineers and manufacturers work simultaneously to build DMUs
• Simplified change and customisation management
• Simplified aircraft maintainability