Airbus project VIVACE aims for more cost-effective development

Photo: Airbus S.A.S©2005

Launched in January 2004, this four-year project – co-funded by the European Commission – brings together 63 major partners forming a representative group of the European aeronautical industry. The overall objective is to reduce costs for aircraft development by 5% and to reduce the development phase of new aircraft design by a similar percent. In addition, the VIVACE project aims to contribute to a 50% reduction in the development costs for a new or derivative gas turbine engine and to a 30% reduction in the lead time required to bring it to market. To achieve this, the work in VIVACE is organized around Use Cases. These are real industrial simulations of a part of the aircraft, the engine or a development process, reflecting both the Virtual Product and the Virtual Extended Enterprise. Both include requirements for early product simulation on one hand and distributed working methods on the other.

VIVACE is comprised of three technical sub-projects. Two projects, Virtual Aircraft and Virtual Engine, represent the aircraft and engine manufacturers. The third project, Advanced Capabilities, will ensure that the component frameworks developed by the first two are effectively integrated into an advanced concurrent engineering design framework known as the VIVACE Collaborative Engineering Environment.

The VIVACE project brings together 63 major partners from the European aeronautical industry.

With EXPRESS Data Manager™, Jotne EPM Technology is delivering the technological backbone and the development of core software components for this environment. In the end VIVACE will deliver a Virtual Product Design and Validation Platform based on a distributed concurrent engineering methodology supporting the Virtual Enterprise.

EPMT’s role in the VIVACE project is to provide core competence together with the sub-project leader, EADS CCR, in the development of the Engineering Data Management (EDM) Framework, especially the EDM architecture and the development of the platform itself. An important EPMT contribution to the project is gathering and coordinating the requirements pertaining to collaborative engineering. To facilitate this, EPMT has developed a multi-disciplinary data model that can be used to implement the different use cases. In this context, EPMT is working closely with AIRBUS, SNECMA and Eurocopter. The development of solutions to bridge the gap between simulation, design and other engineering processes, is made in close cooperation with other software partners in VIVACE, including MSC and Dynaworks.

Philippe Homsi, VIVACE project leader, says, “We can reduce risk by increasing our knowledge of the complete aircraft under development at its earliest design stages. This is what VIVACE is about. Besides, modifying aircraft designs in the later stages of a development program costs a lot of time and money and we recognize that this is where savings could be made. Some modifications could be avoided by improving the use of simulation at the earlier stages and working with key suppliers to develop these simulation methods.”