Successful Access to Legacy Data
Laurent Ducom, Director, Engineering Processes & Tools, Bombardier Aerospace.

On December 17, 1935 exactly 32 years after the historic flight of the Wright brothers, another legend took-off: the Douglas DC-3. It entered service in 1936, and between 400 and 1000 of the 10928 aircraft produced are still in service today, almost 70 years later. This is not a single case. Many of the 1657 DHC-2 Beaver (first flight in 1947) are still flying, and the Boeing B52, initially delivered to the Strategic Air Command on June 29, 1955 is still in operation, undergoing upgrades and expected to remain in service until at least 2030.

Today, the estimated life of an aircraft is averaging 40 years. Access to the product data is required during this complete timeframe. Obviously during the production phase, but also as long as one aircraft is flying, either for support or modifications & upgrades, this becomes even more critical as the industry relies more and more on an "electronic master dataset."

However, during the 40-year life of the product, the IT systems and environments will be going through many generations. An aircraft today might be defined with a hybrid dataset composed of legacy Mylar, 2D CAD drawings and 3D parts. When implementing a PLM solution in such type of program, we should ask ourselves the following questions:

• How should I integrate my legacy data in my PLM environment?
• How do I make sure that the data I am producing and managing today will be available and usable throughout the life of the program?

In order to help the industry to answer these questions, COE has created the “Successful Access to Legacy Data” track for the next Industry workshop – Aerospace. During these sessions, we intend to:

• Present case studies from the industry (Lockheed Martin & Bombardier Aerospace)
• Review Dassault Systemes’ strategy with regards to access to legacy data.
• Provide a prioritized set of requirements from the Industry to Dassault Systemes, to be incorporated in the future releases of CATIA / ENOVIA / SMARTEAM.

In order to get the most successful workshop, COE would like to collect the industry issues and requirements with regards to Successful Access to Legacy Data. These issues will then be compiled, consolidated and prioritized by a panel representing the industry (both OEM and Suppliers). If you would like to participate, please submit your ideas to the COE forums at http://www.coe.org/forums.

Please find attached a set of major subjects identified by the author.

PLM of the PLM
Like most product, each company needs to have a strategy for the PLM, and therefore set-up a product lifecycle strategy for their PLM, including the creation, deployment, support and decommissioning (replacement by the next PLM product) phases. Today, the main issues are found in the following areas:

• Inter-operability between V5 releases
  • Within a single company, more than one instance and version of the product may exist. This creates significant support issues.

• How to optimize the management of the various Releases and updates within a company?
  • How can suppliers support different OEM’s running different releases of the same product?

• Effort minimization to upgrade to the major version
  • The upgrade from CATIA V4 to V5 represents a significant effort, which too often prevents the migration to the new Version, from a technical and human standpoint.
  • What is the strategy to ensure that upgrades to future CATIA / ENOVIA versions will be optimized for the industry?
  • What is the DS strategy to ensure that data created in CATIA/ENOVIA V5 (or earlier versions) today can be successfully accessed and used 40 years from now?

Multi Platform Integration
In the extended enterprise context, the ability to interface with Customers / Suppliers operating with different CAD systems, or the migration from one system to another is key. The level of integration between systems can be asserted in two dimensions:

• The complexity of data being exchanged
• The level of interaction between the different platforms

2D / 3D Data Integration
The cost of creating a 3D model of an old product is usually prohibitive forcing the user to stay in a 2D environment, but creating 3D models as required.

What is the best practice and proposed product evolution to ensure a seamless integration of 2D and 3D data within a single product structure?

How to maximize to the benefits of the migration to a hybrid 2D/3D product structure?

If this article has touched some of your enterprise’s critical issues, the COE Aerospace Workshop (17-18 October 2005 in Wichita, Kansas) will have an entire track focused on these issues.