Modern engineering products such as aircraft consist of a multitude of interconnected subsystems such as engine, control systems with sensors, actors and displays with switches and so forth. The design of an aircraft includes therefore the design of all these interconnections between these subsystems. More specifically, electrical subsystems need to be interconnected using an electrical wire harness (by a so-called "3D-routing" task) and the hydraulic subsystems need to be interconnected by a hydraulic pipe network (by a so-called "3D-piping" task). Since the start and endpoints of both networks depend on the chosen locations of the subsystems inside the product (i.e. the so-called "3D-packaging" task), all the interconnections of a subsystem need to be updated each time when the package of the system is changed.
In the aircraft industry, this sequence of 3D-packaging, 3D-piping and 3D-routing represents the key issue in the so-called "physical system architecture" design and is executed multiple times (in the course of so-called "architecture trades") in order to find a feasible, a good or even an optimal solution in respect to the given constraints. Since in today's European aircraft industry, physical system architecture design is a design task executed manually by human experts, the design and all the subsequent modifications to achieve an optimal physical system architecture accounts for many tedious design loops which may easily take days, weeks or even months. The fact that the task of physical system architecture design is multi-disciplinary by nature and is governed by internal company design codes as well as by international and national design standards and regulations which underlines the immens manual and intellectual effort behind.
Europe's competitiveness in the aircraft sector relies on technological innovations driven by hardware, software or process innovations in both design and manufacturing. Despite the permanent increase in product complexity and the rising demand in product mass customization, the efforts of reducing cost, shortening time to market and increasing product quality are the key factors for the commercial success of Europe's aerospace industry facing global competition. Automating complex design tasks by machine-executable workflows consisting of sequences of "smart algorithms" borrowed from graph theory and artificial intelligence embedded in a software optimization framework (i.e. the so-called PHAROS software stack) allows the automated exploration of design alternatives for 3D-packaging, 3D-piping and 3D-routing. This results in enormous savings of design time and cost while still increasing product quality by first-time-right designs and collapsing the former manual design time of weeks to months down to the runtime of the smart algorithms, usually only hours or days.
The "Physical Architecture Optimization System" (PHAROS) project aimed therefore at the development of a fully automated software solution for physical system architecture design under special emphasis on developing an algorithmic solution for 3D-packaging, 3D-piping and 3D-routing embedded in an optimization loop. The elimination of tedious manual routine work allows to shift the engineering effort to higher levels in the product value chain and to concentrate more on engineering system performance and system architecture trades instead. The performance of the developed PHAROS software stack is illustrated in a public demonstrator in form of a wing system architecture optimization, and a confidential industrial demonstrator in form of an aircraft A320 series landing gear bay provided by the industrial partner AIRBUS.
