Virtual Product House
The development of an aircraft has very long development cycles, which make it difficult or even impossible to introduce innovations. On the one hand, the necessary interaction of many actors in the development phase means a high organizational effort. On the other hand, the data required for approval is distributed across the systems of different development partners and, until now, has usually had to be compiled manually in a time-consuming process.
The Virtual Product House supports digital collaboration
The Virtual Product House (VPH) combines the expertise of different actors to digitize aircraft development from design, development and certification to decommissioning. To this end, the Institute for Software Technology is developing a digital infrastructure shared by all project partners. Our researchers are also investigating how simulations can be used for virtual aircraft certification. In the first phases of the project, these methods will be tested on the digital design of a wing flap and a hydrogen tank.
New aircraft types are developed in collaboration with many project partners who use different tools to design, simulate and evaluate aircraft designs. Together with the project partners, we are developing the so-called Common Source, a process framework that provides software tools for communication and collaboration as well as development processes. This will enable digital collaboration between all project partners.
RCE as a tool for simulation chains
A central component of Common Source is the DLR Institute for Software Technology's distributed integration platform "RCE". Using RCE, the project partners can create simulation chains and run them in a distributed manner. Intellectual property is also taken into account, as the software used remains with the partners. In order to continuously improve RCE, we are gathering experience and best practices for the entire digital process.
Many simulation and analysis software tools are used in aircraft design. To speed up the development process, the VPH is investigating how this simulated data can be used instead of real measurement data to certify a component. For certification, it must be clear which software tools generated which data and how this data was used in later steps. This information is known as provenance. We are investigating how provenance information can be collected, stored and archived in the common source. In particular, we are investigating how provenance information can be captured from within RCE.
Project runtime:
- Since 2017
Scientific participants:
- DLR Institute of Aerodynamics and Flow Technology
- DLR Institute of Aeroelasticity
- DLR Institute of Flight Systems
- DLR Institute of Software Methods for Product Virtualization
- DLR Institute of System Architectures in Aeronautics
- DLR Institute for Lightweight Systems
- Airbus Operations
- FFT Produktionssysteme
- Liebherr-Aerospace
- IABG
Project website:
Publications on this project: