The Management of Product Data in an Integrated Aircraft Analysis Environment

Today's industry spends billions of dollars each year on generating engineering data as part of the product development process. This data is stored in the diverse proprietary formats of software vendors. These change rapidly and, particularly in aerospace projects, the lifecycle of the applications software is so short that the data will be inaccessible over much of the life of the associated product. This paper describes the work conducted in an EU collaborative research program to develop a standards-based approach to managing product data. The project used the EXPRESS language, as defined by Part 11 of the ISO10303 STEP standard, for data modelling. A principal focus of the project was the capture and exchange of product and analysis data in a multidisciplinary optimization environment. Two separate approaches were investigated first using a specialized EXPRESS schema that was developed specifically to meet the project requirements and, second, a generic approach based upon the STEP PDM Schema