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This paper reports on a methodology for risk reduction, developed and tested at a brand new aerospace manufacturing facility, producing high value aero-structures. The facility was formed as part of a ‘Risk Sharing Partnership’ between Airbus and GKN for production of the Airbus A350 ‘Fixed Trailing Edge’ (FTE). Whilst operating in New Product Introduction (NPI), the challenge for GKN was to increase production volume for each successive year of operations. At the time of writing, the facility was producing FTE structures at a rate of 4 per month i.e. Rate 4, and attempting to transition to Rate 6. The ultimate aim was to produce FTE structures at Rate 13 within an 8 year period whilst concurrently engineering the product and improving its processes. For schedule adherence, elimination of process failures was critical and often manifested at the final stage of assembly (integration cell).

When forming components using composite materials, manual lay-up techniques remain unrivalled, despite shortcomings that limit geometrical complexity. As a result efforts towards automation of the manufacturing process can be desirable. These can be through more automated builds, or via better informing the manual lay-up through simulation. Automation of more complex components is however difficult to achieve due to some technological barriers. Some progress in simulation tools to predict formable shapes has been made, but little in tools to predetermine the manual operations required. The work herein describes a concept to link component design and manufacture using an in-house simulation tool developed at the University of Bristol, UK, called Virtual Fabric Placement.