The benefit of experience

For the development of its A350 XWB, Airbus needed a way to ensure quality and consistency across all stakeholders worldwide to meet aggressive production ramp-up targets and customer commitments.
Collaborating on the most accurate and up-to-date product information across the value chain has enabled Airbus to significantly reduce engineering changes and deliver an exceptional level of first flight maturity — keeping the A350 XWB programme on target.

As part of its ‘Future by Airbus' programme, Airbus asked 20,000 people at airshows, events and online what they expect from air travel in 2050. The answers were not surprising: cheaper, greener, more sustainable, less stressful, quieter and more fun. In the past, it was enough to get passengers to where they wanted to go safely and on time. While this is still true today, airlines are now focusing on the passengers' flight experience. With the A350 XWB, the airline manufacturer bets the passenger flight experience will be a positive one. With 700 planes in the Airbus order books, customers apparently agree.

The A350 XWB combines the latest advances in aerodynamic wing design with an intelligent airframe. Both the fuselage and wing structures are made of carbon fibre – more than 50% of the entire jet.

“The A350 XWB is the first plane to so extensively use this light-weight material, which greatly contributes to its fuel efficiency,” says Didier Evrard, executive vice-president, head of A350 XWB programme at Airbus. “Its advanced wing design makes the XWB a quieter and more aerodynamically efficient aircraft. Flying will be a whole new experience.”

Collaborative innovation

To achieve this goal, Airbus has deployed Dassault Systèmes' 3DEXPERIENCE Platform to drive a global collaborative solution throughout the value chain from engineering to manufacturing, integrating new improvements over previous programmes. Reaching an unprecedented level, collaboration is at the forefront of Airbus' innovation strategy.

“When we started the programme we really needed to develop methods and tools which were radically different from the A380, not only to ensure that all engineers involved in development worked on the same design platform, but also to have them communicate in a single environment,” notes Evrard.

On the A350 XWB programme, up to 4,000 people were connected daily to the platform, with 85% of them coming from the supply chain.

“For previous programmes, each site had its own Digital Mock-Up (DMU) and everyone worked separately,” states Antoine Scotto, head of the PLM programme for the A350 XWB at Airbus from 2007 to 2011. The lack of communication extended design time and introduced errors that drove up costs. “This time, we federated our development platforms under one umbrella – ENOVIA – and provided Airbus employees and the extended enterprise with access to this unique data reference. With ENOVIA, synchronisation takes only a few minutes, against several days previously.

“By re-engineering its development processes, Airbus has facilitated collaboration at the design and development phase all the way to production. Indeed, the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform has helped unleash a collective exchange of ideas among programme stakeholders, which contributed to improve everyone's efficiency.

“We had many challenges including a very aggressive development schedule and the need to ramp-up production quickly to satisfy our delivery commitments,” explains Evrard. “With 3DEXPERIENCE, our design quality and efficiency have considerably improved.”

Adds Scotto: “We used CATIA to design the aircraft's structure, the installation systems, the tubing, the composites parts, and the electrical systems completely in 3D.”

For example, Airbus reinvented the way they sized and installed the hydraulic and electrical systems.
“With CATIA, we implemented a full 3D Master approach to design the electrical harness installation for the A350 XWB, which simplifies the process and improves overall design quality,” Scotto continues. Harmonizing the end-to-end harness installation process reduced costs and lead time, and supported the A350 XWB industrial ramp-up. “Engineers have reduced the time needed to update an installation plan by 50%, and decreased the design change requests generated when creating manual 2D drawings by 25%. Everything was installed, fitted and verified digitally and if there were any errors, they were corrected before physical installation,” he adds.

Increases in efficiency

The DMU enabled Airbus to link manufacturing with the design office. “Any changes made by the design office were communicated to manufacturing in real time. This dramatically reduced tooling production time,” Scotto says. “The quality of the design was so outstanding that manufacturing almost never requested any redesign work,” Evrard adds.

Engineers performed realistic nonlinear analyses with SIMULIA to predict, very early in the design process, the strength and behaviour of the aircraft's structure. “We created very large simulation models based on the CATIA design information and performed full-scale, nonlinear structural simulations,” Scotto affirms. “With SIMULIA, we transitioned from an approximate, linear analysis approach to a more accurate, nonlinear analysis, which gives us a deeper understanding of how the structure really performs in a given situation.”

From manufacturing engineering to plant operations, DELMIA was used to secure programme lead-time and ensure aircraft manufacturability. In addition, DELMIA enhanced Airbus' ability to design and optimise industrialisation from assembly station to elementary assembly operations and support automation. For the Airbus A330, the final assembly line cycle took around four months. By starting the cabin installation very early, the A350 XWB assembly process was shortened by 30%.
Dassault Systèmes Industry Services support was instrumental in implementing and deploying the complete A350 XWB environment. “The collaboration between Airbus' and Dassault Systèmes' teams was very strong,” Evrard says.

Digital continuity

Benefits of using a single DMU for the A350 XWB doesn't stop with engineering and manufacturing but extends to downstream processes used in customer services. While in past programmes customer services relied on manually drawn 2D illustrations, digital continuity provided by the 3DEXPERIENCE platform enabled Airbus to implement customer service processes that directly reuse the DMU. For example, using 3DVIA, Airbus implemented a Structural Repair and Maintenance (SRM) system enabling access, query and navigation within the DMU, to identify structural parts for allowable damage or repair. This made it much easier to identify parts as well as remove the manual work required to create the 2D illustrations and call-outs.

The 3DEXPERIENCE Platform has become the core and strategic enabler for Airbus on the A350 XWB programme.
The A350 XWB team's newest challenge is to accelerate production ramp-up, in collaboration with their supply chain, to meet Airbus' delivery commitments. “With all the right people accessing a common DMU through the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform, communication is easy, decisions are made on the fly, and problems are solved faster,” Scotto affirms.

“Making the A350 XWB possible presented tremendous technical, technological and organisational challenges due to the complexity of the programme and the number of outsourced stakeholders,” Evrard concludes. “But with Dassault Systèmes' solutions, we introduced harmony in our processes, methods and tools, and saved precious time that we spent on innovation instead. For my final programme as director, I could not have hoped for a more thrilling challenge.”

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