FIG. 1 illustrates a system installation process 100 of an aircraft. In particular, FIG. 1 illustrates an electrical and tubing installation process 100. In FIG. 1, the system installation process 100 may be divided into three phases, such as a conceptual space reservation phase 102, a project lifecycle management (PLM) publication phase 104, and a system installation phase 106. In the conceptual space reservation phase 102, an aircraft structure template having an outer boundary of the aircraft may be extracted from a computer-aided design (CAD) file as in step 108.
In step 110, a conceptual space reservation is generated by referencing the outer boundary of the aircraft. The conceptual space reservation may be a geometric figure of the aircraft where space for design entities of the aircraft as well as functional attributes associated with the design entities may be reserved during the conceptual space reservation phase 102. For example, the conceptual space reservation for equipments, cables and tubes may be performed with geometry size approximation.
Design entities of the aircraft are defined by functional drawings and space is reserved for these design entities during the system layout definition 112. Additionally, functional attributes allocation 114 and functional rules and risk simulation 116 associated with installation of the various systems in the aircraft may be performed during the conceptual space reservation phase 102.
Then, in step 118, the conceptual space reservation of the aircraft is stored in one or more design databases such as a graphics tool database, a legacy CAD tool database, an equipment database and a schematic database. In step 120, three dimensional space reservation systems of the aircraft may be manually generated based on the conceptual space reservation stored in the one or more design databases. Since a designer who had prepared the conceptual space reservation may not be the same designer who has prepared the three dimensional space reservation systems, the functional attributes and/or connectivity information associated with the design entities may not be accurately transformed during conversion from the conceptual space reservation to the three dimensional functional space reservation systems. Thus, the designer who has created the three dimensional space reservation systems of the aircraft may need to recreate or rebuild the functional attributes and/or connectivity information during the detailed design of the aircraft.
Then, in step 124, the three dimensional functional space reservation systems may be stored in a PLM database during the PLM publication phase 104. Further, in step 126, an installation of various systems of the aircraft is performed, where a tubing routing 128, an electrical routing 130, a heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) routing 132, a waste routing 134, etc. associated with the aircraft are implemented.
In step 136, visual verification of each aircraft system being installed is repeatedly performed with respect to the three dimensional functional space reservation systems obtained from the PLM database. The visual verification of the compliance may be necessary at this juncture due to the loss of functional attributes and/or connectivity information during generation of the three dimensional functional space reservation systems of the aircraft, although the functional and/or connectivity information may have been available while the conceptual space reservation of the aircraft was being generated.
In addition, the system installation process 100 requires storing each version of the system layout and has no provision for comparison of system layouts so that only those design entities that are modified or newly created can be stored to avoid redundant storage of all the design entities. Typically, there may be nearly thirty thousand design entities (parts) in an aircraft system and during revisions only a few of these design entities (for example, only about 500-600 design entities) are affected and only those affected requires storing. The existing system installation process 100 requires storing all the thirty thousand design entities, which can be very time consuming.
Further, the system installation process 100 requires storing all the design entities with new names. Furthermore, memory storage for each entity in the design layout is created even though a design entity is not affected in the new version. Creating such huge design entities for each small evolution can make the database huge and can result in loss of time in maintainability. Moreover, today, to ascertain any modifications made to design entities with respect to the previous version require manually checking the design entities, which can be very tedious and time consuming process to designers.
The drawings described herein are for illustration purposes only and are not intended to limit the scope of the present disclosure in any way.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds