Early concurrent engineering in the aerospace industry supported by a Digital Thread framework

The traditional sequential aircraft design process is reaching its limits in an increasingly complex environment. Therefore, it has become an industrial necessity to implement radical change in working methods. This paper focuses on the conceptual design phase, where concurrent engineering offers the greatest potential to improve the costs, quality, and development time of a new aircraft. It pays particular attention to the knowledge management and modeling activities used to provide global perspectives that are inherently lacking in early phases. A digital thread framework is presented linking model-based systems engineering artifacts from product and manufacturing systems, coupled with knowledge capture methods. This framework aims to enable early trade-of analysis to support concurrent engineering during the conceptual design phase.