DiCADeMa - Digital Cabin Architectures and Design for Manufacturing
DLR
DLR
When purchasing an aircraft, the parameters of range, number of seats and cash operating costs are currently decisive for airlines. Aircraft from major manufacturers hardly differ in these criteria. The airlines therefore want to differentiate themselves primarily through cabin features in order to win customers. The DLR project DiCADeMa (Digital Cabin Architectures and Design for Manufacturing) is researching digital consistency from design to production and assembly of cabin components for the current and next generation of cabins, so that cabins can be designed more flexibly and manufactured with shorter lead times thanks to complete consistency.
Together with the DLR Institute System Architectures in Aviation (SL) in Hamburg, the project is developing methods, processes and metadata models for a fully digital continuity from a new cabin system architecture to the automatic assembly of cabin components and a feedback of the resulting assembly data back to the cabin system architecture (co-design) for current and future customisable cabin configurations. The advantage of the complete digitalisation and automation of the entire cabin assembly process makes it possible to process customer adaptations at any time and incorporate them into the assembly process. This can significantly reduce the lead time and costs for commissioning the production line as well as the delivery time of the customised aircraft. Aircraft manufacturers have a great interest in further increasing the efficiency of production and assembly processes for the cabin in order to be able to flexibly implement change requests for airlines at any time.
DLR
A central element of this project is the implementation of an interface module that exchanges data between the cabin system architecture (SL) in Hamburg and the assembly department (ZLP) in Augsburg. Once the data has been exchanged via the interface, tasks are then to be automatically derived from the design data. In the next step, a machine model is used to generate machine programmes for the production systems in a post-processor. Both the machine model and the post-processor are to be developed. The challenge with the machine model is to define a generally valid description for different types of plant. Existing and emerging standards from the Industry 4.0 environment are to be tested for their suitability.