Ph. D. Project
Title:
Model-Based SoI and Manufacturing systems Co Engineering Framework, for early concurrent architecture tradeoff
Dates:
2022/10/14 - 2025/10/13
Supervisor(s): 
Other supervisor(s):
Description:
Context of the PhD work
Airbus and Université de Lorraine are two major actors in the development of practices and knowledge and in training in the field of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). They are joining their efforts to create a synergy of complementary expertise, building on fruitful past collaborations in research and teaching in MBSE.
This thesis work will be a contribution to an industrial chair. This chair involves Airbus, and two research laboratories, CRAN UMR CNRS and ERPI, from Université de Lorraine. Its main objective is to develop and experiment an Actionable Collaborative Trustworthy Executable (ACTE) MBSE framework, for early systems requirements validation and design verification and for the co-engineering of the main system and its manufacturing (or industrial) system.

Context and industrial problems
Recently, the air transport market has changed significantly, due to a high variation in demand caused by the COVID crisis and due to the emergence on the market of new low-cost airlines. These changes require aircraft manufacturers to reduce the ramp-up time, lower their production costs, reduce the time to market for their products... Hence aircraft manufacturers must review their approach for the engineering of their System of Interest (SoI, e.g. aircraft) as well as for the engineering of their key enabling systems (manufacturing (or industrial), support & services) to meet the previous goals, to achieve a global performance in terms of availability, safety and security, etc. and to maintain this performance during all their long life-cycle (more than 30 years). To keep their competitive advantage, companies will have to develop early capabilities based on digital technologies to (re)specify, (re)design, verify and validate manufacturable and operable complex systems, in a context of deeper collaborations with multiple stakeholders, within the aircraft manufacturers and its extended enterprise. Systems engineers use many kinds of models to represent different views of the system (operational, logical, physical, behavioral, ...) and to verify the system behavior and the satisfaction of requirements such as availability, safety, mass, or power consumption... The digital transformation of development and MBSE principles open new opportunities to support the development of performant, safe, manufacturable and operable complex systems with an executable MBSE (eMBSE) approach grounded on a Modeling & Simulation approach supporting System Engineering goals.

Scientific issue
An important challenge is that of concurrent engineering of the aircraft system and its closely linked contributing systems to guarantee the expected overall performance. In particular, the links between the engineering of the aircraft system and that of the manufacturing and assembly system is at the heart of this research topic. It is necessary to have a global and coherent vision of the components of the aircraft system and their interactions with the production system. It is these complex interactions that are essential to establish and maintain. Indeed, if the aircraft must be specified in detail, before developing the production system, then the time to market increases and many constraints are transfered to the manufacturing system that impact its performance. It is therefore necessary to synchronize the life cycles of the System and its Manufacturing System as early as possible, from the conceptual level in order to link, as soon as possible, both engineering phases.
The work developed in this thesis has as an originality to be placed in an MBSE approach for both SoI and Manufacturing System engineering and in a context of extended enterprise and industry of the future. The aim is to contribute to the synchronization of both engineering systems, in the form of specific views and this from the upstream phases of engineering (conceptualization). The synchronization will also cover the individual trade-off analyses which will be studied jointly in order to guarantee overall performance (concurrent trade-off analysis).

For that matter, this thesis will address:
• The aircraft system architecture, the industrial system architecture and the manufacturing processes with an MBSE approach as a potential solution to contribute to the overall synchronization of both architectures. The interest of having a system referential to support early architecture analyses will be studied, in particular to provide architectural concepts and V&V evidence of functional architectures. A particular attention should be paid on the top program objectives/requirements validation, the upstream global optimization of the proposed architectures, the impact analysis and the ensured consistency for integration.
• The synchronization will cover the trade-off analyses that will be studied jointly in order to guarantee overall performance of both systems. A particular attention should be paid on the formal links between system operational scenarios, functions and requirements. The formalization of model exchanges between development departments will focus on the sharing of models and views, and on model architecture. In particular it is important to characterized the aircraft-centric view of the industrial system (resp. the industrial system-centric view of the aircraft) as a variable manufacturing (resp. aircraft) model used to discuss the manufacturability (resp. product to be done) in regards to existing capabilities.
• Address the industrial system design for a product family set or different product types, considering the flexibility needed in the system lifecycle. For the product system design, one product or a product family will be considered including the modularity or flexibility that could be integrated towards manufacturability. The nature of the systems dependency related to the lifecycle phase should be address as part of this exercise.
Keywords:
Model-Based System Engineering, Co-Enginnering, Aircraft engineering, Manufacturing system
Department(s): 
Modeling and Control of Industrial Systems