A major challenge in the transport sector is to make economic growth compatible with sustainability and environmental constraints, while remaining competitive and innovative. The development of aeronautical products is a complex multidisciplinary process with requirements and constraints on the air transport system as a whole, the aircraft, and all the individual components to be produced. A major challenge impeding an efficient and cost-effective design processes is the integration of the various levels of the aeronautical supply chain. Therefore, the aeronautical industry needs to connect all the people, skills and technologies involved in its collaborative, multi-national and cross organizational processes, by means of a digital representation of production systems, supply chains, and seamless operations across diverse disciplines, during the entire lifecycle of the product.
The high level objective of AGILE 4.0 is to bring significant reductions in aircraft development costs and time-to-market through the implementation of an integrated cyber-physical aeronautical supply chain, thereby increasing the competitiveness of the European aircraft industry, from integrators and high-tiers suppliers to SMEs, leading to innovative and more sustainable aircraft products.
AGILE 4.0 targets the digital transformation of main pillars of the aeronautical supply-chain: design, production, certification and manufacturing. The composition of the AGILE 4.0 consortium and capabilities available enable to address realistic development scenarios integrating multiple stakeholders and covering all the aspects of the development of complex aeronautical systems.
AGILE 4.0 will provide the aircraft industry with a way to model, assess, and optimize complex systems addressing the entire lifecycle. The technologies developed will enable stake-holders and actors of the aeronautical supply chain to perform trade-off which have never been possible to model before.
PARTNERS
DLR is the national research establishment for aeronautics of Germany. For its large scale, interdisciplinary research projects techniques for collaboration comprising information technologies and collaboration processes are competencies that constitute the publically available backbone of AGILE. Furthermore; structural modelling and optimization competencies are provided to the project
CFS Engineering offers services in the numerical simulation of fluid mechanics and structural mechanics engineering problems. It is a supplier for engineering consulting and services complying with industry standards. CFSE hosts the CEASIOM aircraft analysis suite and provides support and services. CFSE is a typical company providing innovative services to real and Extended Virtual Enterprises.
Bombardier and EMBRAER are large scale industries in the consortium and, as manufacturers, are the final customer of all kinds of technologies ranging from supplied components via analysis services and software till applied research. The involvement of Bombardier and EMBRAER enables AGILE 4.0 to realistically build the central use cases on large transportation regional jet aircraft. This is of high interest due to an increasing demand for this category of aircraft driven (among others) by emerging countries. Since there is no European manufacturer active in this market segment, European suppliers can only be successful if they are technically capable of collaborating with non-European aircraft manufacturers. Interms of collaboration techniques AGILE 4.0 targets a very realistic and important use case which is enabled by the participation of Bombardier and EMBRAER! Bombardier and EMBRAER are involved in AGILE 4.0 using own funding and do not receive EC grants.
KE-Works is a SME developing Knowledge Based Engineering solutions tailored for the needs of their customers. KE-Works brings professional experience in the development of knowledge enabled solutions for MDO into the consortium.
ONERA is the national research establishment for aeronautics of France. Expertise and tools for optimization are main contribution of ONERA to the AGILE consortium. High fidelity aerodynamic optimization measures are provided as part of long established ONERA-DLR collaboration.
UNINA is one of the leading universities for aeronautics, and one of largest in aerospace engineering in Italy. Main tasks in AGILE will be providing expertise in Aircraft Design, and optimization techniques.
Airbus Defence and Space is a large scale industry, world leader in both civil and military aircraft design with a more than 25 years of experience in multidisciplinary airframe analysis and optimisation. Airbus Defence and Space represents the state of the for Hi-Fi MDO airframe solutions, and provides to AGILE 4.0 consortium analysis capabilities with LAGRANGE MDO suite, and evaluation with respect to industrial standards of the developed techniques.
Fokker is large scale industry and is supplier of structural components to aircraft manufacturers such as Bombardier. Fokker is also customer of technologies such as analysis services, software and applied research. The collaboration and joint product optimization between Aircraft manufacturer and component supplier is one specific research topic enabled by the participation of Fokker.
Leonardo is large scale industry, relevant international player in both civil and military aircraft design and an important supplier of structural components to aircraft manufacturers. The involvement in AGILE 4.0 will enable realistic metrics and constraints in the test cases considered.
Politecnico di Torino is one of Italy’s most recognized universities for aeronautics. PoliTo has technical expertise in Aircraft Conceptual Design, Aircraft Sub-System Design, Green Technologies, demonstrated in several research programs in collaboration with Leonardo.
TU Delft is one of the leading and largest universities for aeronauticswith outstanding experience in knowledge based aircraft modelling and design; e.g. resulting from the MOB project.
Bombardier and EMBRAER are large scale industries in the consortium and, as manufacturers, are the final customer of all kinds of technologies ranging from supplied components via analysis services and software till applied research. The involvement of Bombardier and EMBRAER enables AGILE 4.0 to realistically build the central use cases on large transportation regional jet aircraft. This is of high interest due to an increasing demand for this category of aircraft driven (among others) by emerging countries. Since there is no European manufacturer active in this market segment, European suppliers can only be successful if they are technically capable of collaborating with non-European aircraft manufacturers. Interms of collaboration techniques AGILE 4.0 targets a very realistic and important use case which is enabled by the participation of Bombardier and EMBRAER! Bombardier and EMBRAER are involved in AGILE 4.0 using own funding and do not receive EC grants.
Concordia University and the Concordia Institute of Aerospace Design and Innovation (CIADI) is a university-wide platform configured to identify, foster, support and promote collaborative research and education opportunities to maintain and grow Concordia’s reputation as a leading provider of multi-disciplinary research and education offerings to the aerospace industry.
ISAE description ...
NLR is the national research establishment for aerospace research in the Netherlands. Expertise and tools for optimization and technologies for cross-organization collaboration are main contribution of NLR in AGILE project.
RWTH Aachen is one of Germany’s most recognized universities for aeronautics. Overall aircraft design on conceptual level under consideration of economical, ecological and social aspects including visual processing of data is remarkable competences to be brought into the AGILE consortium.
ACTIVITIES
AGILE 4.0 is structured into three integration Work-Packages (WP1,WP2,WP3) sequential in time, targeting aircraft collaborative development and optimization scenarios with increasing levels of complexity:
WP1 – Synchronization & Specification: reference state of the art AGILE collaborative MDO technologies are adopted to formulate the AGILE 4.0 reference use cases, and to identify the main requirements and needs to address the digitization of design, production, and certification aspects. This includes making use of pre-existing analysis codes, interfaces, frameworks, and optimization capabilities available in the consortium. The results of this phase are on one side to derive the specifications for the processes, models and tools to be developed, and on another side as reference to measure the success of the developed AGILE 4.0 technologies. WP2 – Digitalization & Modelling: the reference use cases are enhanced by AGILE 4.0 enabling technologies addressing the requirements identified in the first phase. This WP is responsible to deliver the system engineering process, accounting for the requirements and specification identified in the previous phase. During this phase, technologies (models, platforms, methods) are continuously developed, tested, validated, and integrated in the AGILE 4.0 framework. WP3 – Optimization & Validation: the use cases optimization problems are solved by making use of the full AGILE 4.0 framework. This phase is responsible to deliver the optimization process to solve the AGILE4.0 use cases. Large scale, multi-objectives, optimization problems are solved and validated.
The three integration phases are supported by an enabling technologies layer (WP4, WP5), in which the necessary technical solutions are developed. Within this layer, multiple design and optimization methodologies, and modelling platforms are developed and implemented.
A study cases layer (WP6, WP7, WP8) is running along the integration phases, addressing scenarios and applications representative of the complex aeronautical supply-chain.
From the study cases the requirements are continuously pulled during the Integration phases, and pushed into the enabling technologies layers. Therefore, all the developments are pulled and continuously integrated into the study cases. Agile methodologies are deployed to enable the progressive development of the AGILE 4.0 design system.
The overall AGILE 4.0 structure is organized in 10 Work-Packages (WP) representing the main activities.
