Agile Manufactuirng Support
The “Agile Manufacturing Support” is an advanced smart service that utilizes a cyber-physical system to link real-time manufacturing processes with their digital counterparts. The goal of this service is to optimize the production of aerospace hardware by continuously learning from precisely documented results and integrating these insights iteratively into the production process.
This service optimizes the manufacturing of aerospace hardware through real-time data integration and continuous learning from manufacturing processes. Process data is extracted, stored in the Cooperants Data Space, and visualized. This enables iterative adjustments, improves quality, and reduces scrap rates. A shared data space and augmented reality glasses facilitate collaboration and error analysis, while simultaneously minimizing costs, project timelines, and logistical efforts. The service promotes sustainable resource utilization and knowledge transfer within the aerospace industry.
Customer Prime Collaboration
A crucial success factor for an aerospace project is the close and continuous collaboration between the prime contractor and the customer and financier. Traditionally, these project interfaces (both technical and business) involve many documents, with the usual steps: document creation (transferring native information into texts/tables/formulas…), document transfer (PDF creation and email sending), document review (retransferring into information), and commenting/revision. To minimize this non-value-adding and time-consuming process, a dedicated service is focused on presenting data and models, regardless of the tool they are sourced from, directly on a unified platform. This allows for tool-independent views to be defined, relationships to be identified, and progress to be checked. A semantic search makes it easier to access the necessary data. Initially, the focus is on descriptive data from system architecture and system design. Subsequently, data from analyses, which are linked to the descriptive data, will be added. This enables a significant step towards transparency, efficiency, and thus project speed and cost reduction.
Digital Project Management Office
As part of the COOPERANTS project, a Digital Program Management Office (DPMO) is being developed to facilitate collaboration between companies in the aerospace industry within the context of Gaia-X. The DPMO provides support throughout the entire lifecycle of an aerospace vehicle to conduct projects more quickly, safely, and efficiently. A dashboard presents relevant project information and provides access to additional functionalities. The DPMO consists of various Smart Services, including Smart Programme Planning, Model-based Template Manager, Smart Risk & Opportunity Manager, and Smart Review & Delivery Manager. These intelligent tools promote collaboration between companies and facilitate the achievement of common goals in the aerospace industry.
Engineering Dashboard
Functional Digital Twin
The Smart Service “Functional Digital Twin” provides a comprehensive simulation of spacecraft at the functional level, focusing on commanding devices through flight software and monitoring status parameters. This enables closed-loop tests to verify flight software and operational procedures. Within COOPERANTS, this process is optimized through three main services: The SMP2 marketplace provides SMEs access to simulation models, while “Functional Digital Twin as a Service” offers access to various simulators via a web frontend. Test results are delivered through a separate service, promoting transparent communication and trust-building between end customers and satellite integrators.
Holowork
HOLOWORK creates step-by-step 3D work instructions for cleanroom procedures, leveraging the power of Augmented Reality (AR) to bring digital information into the real world. These work instructions can be executed on mobile devices or hands-free using the “HoloLens,” an industrial-grade AR headset. HOLOWORK aims to replace the heterogeneous data landscape for assembly, integration, and test procedures (AIT/AIV) with a single, fully digital system, thus visualizing procedure descriptions and simplifying complex processes. HOLOWORK simplifies work processes, saves time through more efficient workflows, and reduces errors thanks to clearly structured instructions. Additional benefits include providing process data for new applications and reducing paper usage.
Prime Supplier Collaboration
The system definition largely relies on data provided by suppliers in the form of interface descriptions. The multitude of suppliers involved in an aerospace project, the number of technical iteration loops, and the variability and timeliness of the provided data make system definition a lengthy, costly, and error-prone management task. Digitizing this critical process chain has long been demanded but poses high and extensive requirements for cross-company data management. Using the example of the electrical interface, an end-to-end chain from the supplier, through the electrical system architecture, to the wiring harness is demonstrated. The initial (and current) interface data can be licensed/purchased by prime contractors on the marketplace and then refined to meet project requirements in a collaborative data management process.
Robotic Digital Twin
