Abstract:
The assembly line planning process connects product design and
manufacturing through translating design information to assembly integration
sequence. The assembly integration sequence defines the aircraft system
components installation and test precedence of an assembly process. From a
systems engineering view point, this activity is part of the complex systems
integration and verification process. At the early conceptual design phase of
assembly line planning, the priority task of assembly process planning is to
understand product complexities in terms of systems interactions, and generate
the installation and test sequence to satisfy the designed system function and
meet design requirements. This research proposes to define these interactions
by using systems engineering concept based on traceable RFLP (Requirement,
Functional, Logical and Physical) models and generate the assembly integration
sequence through a structured approach. A new method based on systems
engineering RFLP framework is proposed to generate aircraft installation and
test sequence of complex systems. The proposed method integrates aircraft
system functional and physical information in RFLP models and considers these
associated models as new engineering data sources at the aircraft early
development stage. RFLP modelling rules are created to allow requirements,
functional, logical and physical modes be reused in assembly sequence
planning. Two case studies are created to examine the method. Semi-
structured interviews are used for research validation. The results show that the
proposed method can produce a feasible assembly integration sequence with
requirements traceability, which ensures consistency between design
requirements and assembly sequences.
