Design for Assembly in the Conceptual Development of Aircraft Systems

Conceptual design for assembly and installation is a key enabler for the improvement and development of an aircraft and related components. This work attempts to define a design for assembly methodology suitable for the evaluation and architecture design of aircraft systems in the preliminary phases of product development (conceptual design). Three main aspects are covered within this work: (i) the definition of a design framework, (ii) the characterization of suitable parameters driving the assessment and development of product architectures, and (iii) the formalization of internal knowledge for that purpose. The proposed approach has been tested in the assessment and development of an aircraft nose section with positive outcomes in terms of knowledge formalization and robustness of results in relation with the issues retrieved by the analysis of the assembly line. Future works will focus on the methodology optimization including automatic data input and mathematical models refinement.