An ontology-based digital thread framework to support early concurrent engineering in the aerospace industry

The increasing complexity of the aerospace industry has highlighted the need to anticipate issues from the entire lifecycle of aircrafts. Identified too late, issues originating from the manufacturing or the maintenance phases can have considerable consequences on the overall development costs, time and quality of aircraft development. Concurrent Engineering (CE) is an approach that aims to improve the design process of a system by considering all lifecycle phases from the initial conceptualization. However, this way of working demands a high degree of collaboration and extensive knowledge sharing among the involved stakeholders. The digitization of the industry has provided new opportunities addressing such challenges. Approaches based on Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are providing compelling ways to foster cross-domain collaboration while incorporating knowledge supporting design decisions. This paper leverages an ontology-based digital thread framework as a bridge between aircraft and manufacturing engineering activities. With enriched insights and global perspectives, this framework aims to enable early cross-domain trade-offs analysis to support knowledge-driven concurrent and collaborative engineering during the conceptual design phase. • Implementation of a Ontology-Based Engineering methodology to capture, model and reuse knowledge to support early concurrent and collaborative engineering. • Development of ontological models supporting the co-architecture process between aircraft and manufacturing system design. • Extraction of engineering knowledge with a method combining human experience and data-driven robustness and scalability for early impact assessment. • Cross-domain MBSE architecture integration into a flexible and agnostic knowledge base envisioned to serve as an enabler digital thread and cognitive digital twin.