ICAD International User Group (IIUG) at COE Fall 2003 Conference & TechniFair

The ICAD International User Group (IIUG) will be hosting several sessions at the COE Fall 2003 Conference & TechniFair, September 28-October 1 in Seattle, Washington. ICAD is recognized as the leading Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) solution for the capture and automation of proprietary customer design and manufacturing processes, particularly in the aerospace and automotive industries. The goal of the IIUG is to promote the use and best practices of KBE throughout all Industries.

Engineers and designers have been using ICAD to design products since 1985 and regularly report process time reductions in excess of 90%. ICAD users automate their product designs and manufacturing processes by storing and accessing all the required knowledge and best practices relating to their design intent, functionality, engineering and manufacturing rules, standards, safety codes, legislative compliance and many more criteria from within their ICAD product model and ICAD defined knowledge base. ICAD is a highly proven technology employed by such renowned knowledge-based organizations as: Airbus Industrie, Boeing, BMW, Corus, Ford, Jaguar and General Motors.

ICAD is developed and maintained by Knowledge Technologies International, Inc. KTI, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Dassault Systemes as of November 2002. KTI, Inc. and Dassault Systemes have been working together to streamline the best Knowledge Based Engineering processes into the Dassault Family line of products. This would provide Dassault Systemes Products with unrivaled functionality and integrated KBE capabilities.

The IIUG has been instrumental to the growth and success of ICAD and KBE within industry today. Because KTI, Inc. customers have always been willing to get involved with ICAD product development, the ICAD system has made great strides in its depth and breath of functionality over the past 15 years. The COE conference will provide both IIUG and COE members the opportunity to get involved with discussions between KTI, Inc and Dassault Systemes about product strategy, requirements, and future directions. Only through these discussions, can the KBE technology continue to grow in usage, functionality, and availability.

KBE Innovation Awards (8-10 May 2002, Boston, Massachusetts, USA)

The following was the explanation from the winners of the KBE Innovation Awards from Delft University of Technology in Delft, The Netherlands. Their application was the development of an ICAD generative model for blended wing body aircraft and integration in a Computer Design Engine for analysis and optimization.

We think that our ICAD application is innovative and has a lot of potential concerning reduction in design and analysis time, so that and increase competitiveness in product development and design should follow.

Problem Identification
Aircraft design is a complex process that requires, since a very preliminary project stage, inputs from all the disciplines involved. A good design is the result of a strong integration of all this inputs, during the all product development. That's what it is generally known as concurrent engineering. A tool to make real concurrent engineering on a large scale, as required by a civil aircraft-like product is not yet available. Many are the facing problems, i.e. the possibility to manage the huge amount of design concepts/variant of a product, which respond to the customer requirements. See figure 1 for the typical diverging-converging design process. For each one of these design variant, amount of FE, CFD, manufacturing, cost, and weight model should be set up. The pro of all that: a quality design. The cons: ages spent in repetitive work, difficulties in evaluate the final properties (cost, weight etc.) of the product. Considering that the virtual company is nowadays spread all over the globe in team of expertise, the problem of interfaces, consistent data exchange and actual geographical distances arise.

The ICAD System to Address the Problem
The ICAD system gave us the possibility to build up a generative model of an aircraft-like product. The model contains the full parametrical description of the product, which is built up starting from elementary blocks called wing trunks. The main target is the generation of the complete geometry of an aircraft (family of aircraft or even very different non conventional configuration) starting from a set of input data. Whilst no fixed numbers or hidden decisions are hard coded inside the lisp files, only the engineering rules to generate the product are included in their parametrical version.

The aircraft model generator should be able to generate as output the geometry of the aircraft whatever is the set of input data. These output data generated by the generative model should be organized in such a format to be straightforward fed to the various disciplines analysis tool. The possibility to run processes in batch, even from remote hosts, to re-use routines, to customize the output reports, to have both the expert system and CAD features included in one tool, make ICAD the best candidates for this part. The paradigm in figure 2, gives an idea of how a versatile "computer design engine" should be organized do design an aircraft-product. The core position retained by the ICAD model generator is evident.

Benefits Achieved by the Application
In a very reduced time it is possible to generate a huge amount of product configurations that potentially answer to the customer requirements. The advantages reside not only in the amount of concepts or product variants that can be handled, but also on the possibility to estimate at a very early stages values and characteristics (price, weight) of the product, normally available only at a late development stage, just starting from a reduced amount of data available. While the former should provide an increased quality in the product design, the latter gives the developer confidence in his design choices and put in condition to make to the customer reliable offers, in a reduced time.

Some Details on Our ICAD Application
A fully parametrical multi-model generator has been developed, able to generate many variants of given aircraft configuration. It is easily customizable to generate completely different configurations just rearranging and re-using pre-developed modules (wing trunk and fuselage modules). See figure 3. For each configuration, all the workload needed to set up the FEM model (non structural mass distribution, material properties, design areas for optimization etc included) for the structural analysis is taken over by the system. The surfaces for the CFD analysis can be automatically delivered in a proper format for different analysis tools at different fidelity level.

The multi-model generator has been embedded inside a so-called design and engineering engine (DEE): a kind of software tools network distributed in different location over several European countries. We acknowledge that big part of the model generator has been developed by the TU Delft as contribution to the V framework European project MOB: Development of a computer design engine for the multi disciplinary design and optimization of a blended wing body aircraft. All the modules are interchangeable according a plug and play approach. Each aircraft configuration generated by ICAD can be perturbed and optimized for a given target function, completely in automatic without the need of any user.

When the optimisator varies a macro parameter, the ICAD input data file is updated and the multimodel automatically produces the proper output for the next analysis loop. The multi-model generator can be continuously enriched, in a modular approach, with new blocks of routines to include more and more relevant aspect of the product to design (cost, manufacturing and tooling details etc.).

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3