Integrated collaboration capabilities for competitive aircraft design

Abstract

Airlines need to continuously extend and modernise their fleets, to keep up with the challenges of air-travel growth, competition, green, safe and secure operations, and growing passenger demands. As a result, the aircraft industry and its supply chain have to manage the growing needs for cost-efficient and complex aircraft in increasingly shorter time. Meanwhile they face their own challenges, such as certification and global competition. Quick evaluation of promising new technologies and concepts facilitates a short time to market. However, the required innovations are costly and risky, and require involvement of many experts from different disciplines and partners. Increasing the level of collaboration within the aircraft industry and its supply chain will be an essential step forward to deal with the challenges. Developing modern aircraft in an increasingly cost and time efficient manner in a collaborative set-up however requires step changes. The EU-funded Horizon2020 project AGILE has developed methods and tools for efficient and cross-organisation collaborative aircraft design, facilitating the rapid evaluation of new technologies and concepts at the early stages of aircraft development. This paper describes the capabilities and illustrates the successful integrated application of the capabilities by means of a collaborative aircraft rudder design evaluation.