AGILE 4.0 – “Towards cyber-physical collaborative aircraft development” has now been launched as part of the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme with the aim of conducting research into future aircraft designs. To kick off the project, some 45 participants from partner organisations in Europe, Canada, Brazil and Russia attended the first meeting, held from 17 to 19 September 2019 in Hamburg at the DLR Institute of System Architectures in Aeronautics.

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AGILE 4.0 is investigating new methods for virtual aircraft design, in conjunction with future concepts for manufacturing and supplier networks. The project partners have set themselves the objective of significantly reducing the cost of aircraft development and the time required for this process. This will provide a substantial boost to the competitiveness of the European aircraft industry. One major challenge facing the mobility sector is reconciling economic growth with sustainability and environmental impact, while remaining competitive and innovative.

The development of aviation products is a complex, multidisciplinary process that is subject to diverse requirements from across the entire air transport system. One of the biggest challenges in achieving an efficient, cost-effective design process is integrating different levels of the supply chain. The air transport industry must therefore bring together the experts and their specialist expertise and technologies throughout the entire product lifecycle to create a digital development network.

This project is the successor to the Horizon 2020 project AGILE – “Aircraft 3rd Generation MDO for Innovative Collaboration of Heterogeneous Teams of Experts”, which was aimed at establishing innovative collaborations between diverse teams of experts. The objective of AGILE 4.0 is the digital transformation of the most important pillars in the aviation supply chain via the seamless networking of design, production, certification and manufacturing. In addition, this European project offers the air transport industry the opportunity to model, evaluate and optimise complex systems across their entire lifecycle. The AGILE 4.0 consortium includes industry partners (Airbus Defence and Space, Bombardier, Embraer, GKN Fokker Aerostructures and Leonardo), SMEs (KE-Works, CFS Engineering), research institutions (DLR, ONERA, NLR, CIAM and TsAGI) and universities (RWTH Aachen, Delft University of Technology, Concordia University Montreal, ISAE-SUPAERO Toulouse, the Politecnico di Torino and the University of Naples).