Digital manufacturing for the Airbus A380

DELMIA Corp.'s 3d PLM solutions have been selected by Airbus to manage tasks such as material flow, ergonomics simulation, and assembly studies at the airframer's new manufacturing facility in Hamburg, Germany. The facility will face many new challenges, particularly in the manufacture of the A380 superjumbo aircraft. Because of the A380 aircraft's size, virtual factory models of the large lifting platforms must take account of the extraordinary demands placed on the ergonomics of each workstation, as well as the kinematics of the aircraft. Every plane will require an assembly area of at least 80 x 80 m and a height of at least 25 m.

"DELMIA tools will be used to simulate and visualize critical manufacturing processes, unifying and integrating components from four different European sites to be assembled at Hamburg," said Peter Schmitt, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing for DELMIA, a subsidiary of Dassault Systemes.

As part of the selection, a DELMIA project office has been established at the Airbus site in Hamburg, where DELMIA aerospace specialists are working jointly with the Airbus teams. In addition to the use of DELMIA solutions, Airbus is also using Dassault Systemes' CATIA for the design and development of the A380.

DELMIA 3d PLM enables customers to optimize their business processes for engineering, manufacturing, maintenance, and support using collaborative workspaces. The software provides both decision support and authoring applications to sustain manufacturing processes, which have to be planned, detailed, and simulated throughout the manufacturing engineering cycle. DELMIA's Digital Manufacturing Solutions are built around an open Product, Process, and Resource (PPR) model, which provides a federating hub connecting the different repositories and applications of the extended manufacturing enterprise. Extending well beyond traditional product data management, PPR enables continuous, dynamic simulation of product performance and manages the effects of change on the product, its processes, and resources. It allows anyone involved, from product engineers to manufacturing process planners and production engineers, to have the full view of all links and dependencies between products, processes, and resources at any point in time.

The solution also provides complete integration with CATIA and ENOVIA. DELMIA users can access configured product data and use it to define, simulate, and optimize the associated processes and resources. Engineering changes can be exchanged easily between the design and manufacturing disciplines.

To support the needs of airframe assembly in the aerospace industry, the DELIMA V5 DPM Assembly solution has delivered a number of key enhancements, such as full use of tolerance information during process planning and better use of Pert and Gantt charts.

Manufacturing intelligence solution

VisualPlant provides a real-time and historical perspective of the activity on the plant floor.

Executive Manufacturing Technologies Inc. has developed a new enterprise manufacturing intelligence solution called VisualPlant. The new software was designed for collecting, displaying, and analyzing all production activity. The solution provides a live, direct, and secure connection to the machines on the plant floor.

VisualPlant seamlessly links each plant floor to the company's corporate architecture so that users can receive a variety of data needed to make important, informed decisions quickly. Users can have secure access via their corporate intranet or a Web browser viewable from anywhere in the world.

Another key feature of the software is its ability to grow and adapt to the needs of the plant. It can be reconfigured quickly and easily without expensive upgrades. VisualPlant can also connect directly to all plant floor machines such as PLCs, CNCs, barcode scanners, manual stations, and quality/test stands, and it can retrieve real-time data without any human input.

VisualPlant allows manufacturers to view and analyze:

• Machine performance, productivity, and efficiencies
• Downtime incidents
• Strategies for improvement and change
• Quality trends.

In addition to VisualPlant, the company also offers a VPTerminal, a workstation that enables operators to manually input any data item configured by the system administrator, including the ability to enter data for assets that do not have automated PLC data collection. Functions that can be performed via the workstation include coding for scrap or reject parts, production scheduling, recipe downloading, coding machine idle times, collecting online and offline inspection results, and tracking downtime incidents.

- Frank Bokulich