Ismail, Omar

This paper delves into Virtual Commissioning’s (VC) crucial role in accelerating aircraft manufacturing amid shorter product life cycles, employing the Software Platform Embedded Systems (SPES) methodology. Developing an adaptable VC architecture tailored for this industry, the study reveals SPES’s efficacy but highlights areas for improvement. Despite its strengths, limitations in decision support and clarity have been identified, recognizing the dynamic nature of industrial scenarios. Offering a valuable blueprint, the presented systematic development process aids researchers and practitioners in the evolving domain of VC and automated production systems. The developed architecture demonstrates the incorporation of complex industrial requirements. However, as the requirements are generic, such as scalability, the architecture is also applicable to other application scenarios.

In the aircraft manufacturing industry, the process plans created for tasks such as automated drilling and riveting are lengthy and require prior testing and validation using Virtual Commissioning (VC), which can be time-consuming. The introduction of a new process plan requires the complete plan to be tested and validated again, exacerbating the challenge of testing and validating several plans or sequences in advance using VC. This research paper proposes using process mining and footprints conformance checking to reduce VC time for robotic systems. By integrating these techniques, differences in process plans can be detected, and only the new sequences or changes from an old to a new process plan need to be tested, significantly reducing the time needed to perform VC. This research implies that the developed approach can improve the efficiency of VC and ultimately enhance the performance of automated manufacturing systems.

Civil Aircraft development and production are facing significant challenges in future. On the one hand, the flight-path to carbon neutral aviation, like using liquid hydrogen, will require game changing technologies. Simultaneously, competition, especially on the single aisle market, is evolving fast and puts pressure on market shares and margins. The necessity of an adaptable and highly efficient production becomes more evident than ever. One contribution to achieve this goal is the research project “Intelligent Modular Robotics and Integrated Production System Design for Aircraft Manufacturing” (iMOD). Namely, it will analyze challenges regarding (1) an integrated and Digital Twin-based system design approach, (2) flexible and modular robotics to support workers with unergonomic tasks and (3) a flexible intralogistics based on Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs). Those three aspects will be integrated into an approach that uses semantic technologies to connect the different components across different levels of functionality and different life cycle phases.