The future of aircraft fleet maintenance
Bertrand Souquet, Project Manager for 3D Portal to Technical Data, explains the ins and outs of this transition.
What is this Airbus 3D to Tech Data project you are working on?
It is a project that consists of visualizing a digital mock-up of a complete aircraft, or even a fleet of several aircraft for an airline, and associating with this digital mock-up information from various engineering domains.
But above all, an additional domain that we added on top is maintenance : when I navigate through the digital mock-up, I click on a piece of equipment, and I get a removal task reference, an inspection task that will redirect me to airnavX, our Airbus portal for Tech Data.
It is a project we are launching on programs where the digital mock-up is available, and which we have already fully deployed on our Beluga XL.
What was the documentation generation process like before 3D?
Previously, we wrote technical documentation using 2D illustrations. This is static and we are forced to simplify them enormously.
On top of that, we remove all the context.
The advantage of the digital mock-up is that the equipment is shown in its “aircraft” context, so you can see how to access it and visualize all the surrounding parts — which likely belong to different systems and sometimes need to be removed in order to take out and replace a piece of equipment.
What are the challenges encountered in linking this data to the mock-up?
It took us about a year to figure out how to most efficiently match the tech data with the DMU data. We have IT teams supporting us on this generation aspect for the Beluga XL.
We created the 3D Portal version directly from the program’s development phase.
So we managed to match all of the tech data with the digital mock-up. However, on other aircraft programs where we had the tech data on one side and the digital mock-up on the other, combining the two is somewhat more complex, since the digital mock-up was not originally designed with maintenance needs in mind.
An example is when a bulb needs to be replaced on a taxi light. The bulb is not present in the 3D model because it is a component supplied by an equipment manufacturer. And the digital mock-up today, which is built for installation purposes, does not necessarily include all the models known as “Light Maintenance parts,” such as the bulb. That level of detail is simply not there.
So we have now planned a solution which is to redirect either to the 2D illustration — which would remain in 2D — or to insert simplified 3D models, such as a cube for example. A basic geometry that allows information such as part numbers to be attached to it.
"We work on complete aircraft models where we want to load the entire aircraft with all its systems."
What, in your view, is the real value of the 3D Juump Infinite suite?
We work on complete aircraft models where we want to load the entire aircraft with all its systems. And one of 3D Juump‘s strengths is its speed in loading the entire aircraft — even multiple versions of the aircraft — and being able to toggle between different filters to switch from one MSN to another very quickly.
I find it genuinely very efficient. Today at Airbus, it is very widely deployed and used every day by thousands of people. It connects to a system called the Core DMU, which is a reference database where all the models created by the design teams are fed into.
These models flow into the Core DMU, and 3D Juump connects to this data lake to generate digital mock-ups based on a set of messages relating to an aircraft model or an airline’s fleet.
That is the very principle of the 3D Portal to Tech Data project.
The future of aircraft fleet maintenance with 3D Juump Infinite
