Session: 03-11-02: Future of Smart Manufacturing

Paper Number: 149987

149987 - Practical Model-Based Integrated Digital Thread for Aerostructures Assembly 

Many manufacturing industries, for example automotive, aerospace, pharmaceutical, food, and others, rely on the assembly of final products in high-labour-cost areas such as the UK. In all of these sectors,  businesses are increasingly faced with the requirement to respond to variable and unpredictable demand in terms of production rate or volume. Furthermore, they must do so at the lowest possible economic cost (in terms of time, energy, space, and price). All of these are particularly acute challenges in aerospace where there is a high-value, high-complexity, heavily-regulated product with a lifecycle that is traditionally measured in decades. Such production systems must therefore deal with the challenge of increasing demand and regulation whilst also increasing autonomy, adaptability, and resilience.

 

Current manufacturing systems in this industry typically have large, monolithic, capital-intensive assembly lines as the physical component, and digital components that operate in information silos. The key objective is therefore the transformation of these current manufacturing systems into dynamic cyber-physical ecosystems that can react to external and internal changes, support the introduction of smart technologies that can self-learn, self-adapt, and self-reconfigure, all whilst maintaining verifiable performance characteristics in a cost-effective manner.

 

Two complementary approaches have received significant attention in recent years as partial enablers to meeting this objective. The first is model-based systems engineering, where models are elevated to play a central role in the engineering process, such that they are the foundation of the requirements, design, analysis, verification, and implementation stages. The second is that of a digital thread, which aims to provide a single digital "source of truth" for production, which spans the entire production lifecycle.

 

In this context, these models are usually those of the product, production process, and/or production system (i.e., cell, line, or factory). The digital thread is therefore usually used to maintain a coherent and constantly updated package of information from the product design, through process planning and production engineering, to commissioning and operation of the equipment, and sometimes also into the through-life product use and even end-of-life.

 

Omnifactory is a UK national testbed demonstrator for digital- and informatics-enabled smart manufacturing technologies that is supporting research in this area. As part of the delivery of Omnifactory and the related research programme, a unique capability exists to explore and demonstrate the practical challenges arising from implementing a connected production lifecycle in the aerostructures assembly sector.

 

This presentation describes the digital and physical infrastructure that exists as part of Omnifactory, as well as the digital manufacturing approach that allows for an aerostructural assembly process to be planned, optimised, and executed. An example from the aerospace industry is given to demonstrate how the design intent is preserved from product design in CAD down to the shop floor operations. In addition to commercial off-the-shelf software, the use of some bespoke solutions from funded research projects are described, along with specific challenges in achieving this at TRL6. Finally, future work and the research outlook are described in terms of recontextualising the Omnifactory in terms of the wider research field and industrial landscape.

Presenting Author: David Sanderson University of Nottingham

Presenting Author Biography: Dr David Sanderson is a Principal Research Fellow with a background in systems engineering specialising in the integration of adaptive systems for complex applications. Having gained his Masters in Information Systems Engineering and PhD in Intelligent Systems and Networks, both from Imperial College London, UK, he is currently part of the Institute for Advanced Manufacturing at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is a member of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour. His work in Nottingham addresses intelligent integration, control, and reconfiguration in manufacturing, with previous low-TRL projects focussing on behavioural modelling and context awareness. Current projects focus on the mid-TRL integration of production systems for high-value, high-complexity, low- or variable-volume products in the aerospace domain that require solutions not addressed by conventional off-the-shelf MES and shop-floor control systems.

Authors:

David Sanderson University of Nottingham
David Bainbridge University of Nottingham
Svetan Ratchev University of Nottingham