British Aerospace and EPM STEP into the future together

Every major aerospace project in progress today relies on a complex web of partners, subcontractors and suppliers. The role of the prime contractor is to bring order to the myriad of pieces of information which flow around a project and then to deliver both the product and the support information to the customer. CALS ­ Continuous Acquisition and Life-cycle Support ­ embraces this problem by bringing together common solutions and providing a working framework.

Sharing information across traditional company boundaries can be achieved only when both parties truly understand the nature and content of the informa-tion being shared. In situations where many organizations need to cooperate and each has its own toolsets and infrastructure, the only long-term solution is to use powerful standards intelligently.

EXPRESS Data Manager used in major aerospace projects

British Aerospace is currently involved in the Nimrod 2000 project , the aircraft which will replace the Maritime Patrol Aircraft for the UK Ministry of Defence. Nimrod 2000 will give the Royal Air Force a state-of-the-art aircraft with advanced capabilities for anti-submarine and anti-surface vessel warfare, surveillance, and search and rescue operations. The prime contractor is British Aerospace Military Aircraft & Aerostructures, with major elements of the new structure and mission systems subcontracted to partners in the UK and the US.

As prime contractor, the company needs to consolidate all the information required for the design, manufacture and through-life support of the Nimrod 2000. This will be done using the company's Product Data Management (PDM) system, IBM's ProductManager, which is being introduced to manage products from the idea phase to disposal.

The design of the aircraft's wing has been subcontracted to British Aerospace Airbus which uses the OPTEGRA PDM system from ComputerVision to manage the wing data. As a result, a requirement exists to transfer the wing data from Airbus to Military Aircraft & Aerostructures, and load it into ProductManager.

Reliable data exchange

Rather than develop a point-to-point translator for moving data between OPTEGRA and ProductManager, a more general translator will be developed using EPM Technology's EXPRESS Data Manager which supports STEP Application Protocol AP203 Conformance Class 1, EXPRESS and SDAI. In the first phase of implementation, EXPRESS Data Manager will be used to transfer the configuration management and product-structure data required for Integrated Logistic Support (ILS) planning. This is expected to be operational by March 1998.

In addition to addressing the immediate data exchange requirements for the Nimrod 2000 project, this STEP implementation and EPM's EXPRESS Data Manager will provide useful knowledge and experience for use in other British Aerospace collaborative projects such as the four nation Eurofighter project. Eurofighter is the next generation of agile combat aircraft designed to meet the requirements of the four partner nations ­ the UK, Spain, Italy and Germany. This will require a two-way communication of STEP Application Protocol AP214 Conformance Class 8 between ComputerVision's OPTEGRA, Siemen's Metaphase and IBM's ProductManager.

EXPRESS Data Manager is also being used to support British Aerospace Military Aircraft & Aerostructures in creating a generic exchange process to transfer information from existing legacy systems, via EXPRESS and SDAI, into IBM's ProductManager.