The French Civil Aviation Authority (French: Direction générale de l’aviation civile, DGAC) launch a project named Excelab for the development of the competitiveness of the aeronautical industry, is based on SkyReal solutions.
Supported by the Civil Aeronautics Research Council (CORAC) of the DGAC, the EXCELAB project started at the end of 2020 and will last 36 months.
The French aeronautics industry is facing major challenges that affect its entire value chain. Whether designing new aircraft or modifying existing ones, the interactions between the various businesses and partners involved in an aircraft program (business aviation, commercial aviation and general aviation) are complex. Aircraft manufacturers, manufacturers, research centers, prototyping companies and systems engineering firms all have different constraints and interests, as well as their own internal tools and development logic.
Current development systems must therefore evolve in order to gain even more agility, to design faster (reduction of development cycles) at controlled costs, and ultimately to strengthen competitiveness.
An ambitious project to improve the competitiveness of the aerospace industry
The EXCELAB project, supported by CORAC and led by Dassault Aviation, aims to enable the industry to optimize the performance of aircraft development processes, both technically and programmatically, by making them more agile, more flexible and more efficient.
To improve cooperation within the industry during the various development phases of a program and to enable rapid innovation, the EXCELAB project’s mission is to establish a common method for formalizing processes and making architecture orientation decisions through co-development. By co-development we mean a set of advanced collaborative engineering processes and methods allowing strong interaction between partners, and decision making based on shared objectives, while respecting the role of each partner.
This project calls on the synergy of skills of leading-edge partners who will work together to develop an operational system for the co-development of aircraft within the industry, namely
Aircraft manufacturers Dassault Aviation (project leader), Airbus Operations, Daher Aerospace,
The manufacturers Airbus Atlantic (formerly Stelia Aerospace) and Liebherr Aerospace Toulouse,
The Onera research center,
The consulting firm Cesames Institut,
The software editor SkyReal.
In order to test this method, industrial use cases have been selected to cover the main co-development issues encountered by players in the sector. They will make it possible to illustrate the interest of the installation of a method of formalization of the processes of co-development as well as the process of application of this method in various contexts. They will thus support the demonstration of the possibility for the whole French aeronautical industry to set up collaborative development methods for current or future projects. Some of the proofs of concept carried out will be based on digital modeling tools that will reinforce the efficiency of the approach.
TWO SKYREAL TECHNOLOGIES AT THE HEART OF THE EXCELAB PROJECT
SkyReal which deploys a Virtual Reality solution applied to industrial processes, will be involved in this project on the software prototyping part. It has been commissioned by the consortium to intervene in this part of the project which consists in developing extended collaborative engineering environments, innovative tools for the analysis and design review of large systems.
In this perspective, SkyReal will also apply its solution dedicated to the system engineering, offering a graphic interface for the analysis and the visualization of the product architectures. This technology allows to take advantage of structuring approaches such as MBSE* (Model-based systems engineering) by offering analysis and visualization tools to make decisions on architectures.
Thus, with the extension of its activities beyond virtual reality, SkyReal will be able to provide the EXCELAB consortium with two mature technologies that will allow the implementation of a common method of formalization of co-design processes.
