22nd Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Harrogate, UK, 28 August - 1st September, 2000
Paper ICAS 2000-5.10.4

THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN DESIGN DATA EXCHANGE : TOWARDS FULLY INTEGRATED AEROSPACE DESIGN ENVIRONMENTS

J. Johnson
BAE SYSTEMS, UK

Keywords: design environments; systems engineering; standards; data exchange; data sharing; step

Aircraft continue to get more complex with each generation, in their structural design, their avionics and systems, and most importantly perhaps, in the increasingly close integration between these aspects. The aircraft development process, the skills brought to bear and its supporting tools and infrastructure also continue to grow in size and complexity. Evidence of the breadth of the systems engineering (SE) process can be seen in various manifestations as documented in standards such as IEEE-1220 (1994), EIA 632 and most recently the emerging ISO 15288. Note however that these capture only views of the generic systems engineering process, the real process used in aircraft developments is considerably more complex, and inevitably is complicated by commercial, political and company/cultural issues. The explosion of desk-top computerisation and internet-associated technologies has also opened up considerable possibilities in tool support for design definition, analysis, simulation and testing, leading to increased complexity in the aircraft design environment, with an increase in associated environment and integration problems. However, recent developments in design data exchange, both in the structural design and the systems areas, promise significant improvements in the degree to which distributed design teams can produce the complex designs characteristically found within modern aircraft better, faster and cheaper. Particular emphasis will be placed on the developments of the European SEDRES projects, and the associated ISO “STEP” standard development AP-233. SEDRES-2 is a European Commission Framework V co-funded project, a continuation of an earlier SEDRES-1 project, which has developed a draft data exchange standard to support the systems engineering domain. This emerging standard is based on “STEP”, and will embrace the product definition aspects crucial to successful SE: product requirements, systems architectures, product functionality, allocation, traceability, and configuration management information. The standard will enable SE tools to exchange such information, and should be applicable to many industries. SEDRES-1 produced a number of prototype implementations, has demonstrated actual data exchange, and early results are confirming the potential business benefits anticipated. STEP (ISO 10303) is the international standard for product data exchange, and is split up into a number of component parts, including a series of ‘Application Protocols’ or AP’s, each covering a specific industry domain. SEDRES has spawned an activity at the ISO level, within STEP, called AP-233 “systems engineering data representation”. AP-233 is building on top of the work of SEDRES and is aiming to produce the International Standard by 2002. As well as describing the achievements of SEDRES, and the status of the AP-233 work, references will also be made to related work by the International Council on Systems Engineering and the relevance of other data exchange standards, such as XML.

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