✈️ SIRI

A system installation visual helper for aircraft designers

Situation

Planes are made out of paper, at least drawing blueprints is one of the most crucial parts. Nowadays things are made a little differently, designers use CAD tools to make their design, but with increasing complexity, they have to deal with “Design Principles” that ensure the safety and conformity of the design. This complexity results in “overdesigns”.

Challenges

The main challenge during this project was to understand, classify and digitalise the entire Electrical Systems Installation chapter from the ATA. It's a chapter with more than 3000 rules to follow in order to route a cable, called SIDP (Systems Installation Design Principles).
The focus of providing an assistant tool must be on the simplicity of usage and accuracy of the provided information.

SIRI stands for Systems Installation Rules Interface

### Solution 1. **Prototyping phase:** With not as much as paper, post-its, Excel sheets and Slideshows, we managed to get a demonstration prototype of our tool

  1. The data-model: We had to build an entire rules-database, dealing with clearances and rules. With the data to handle was complex and in a non-standard format, we had to coop with the R&D teams of AIRBUS through many iterations to get to a consistant data-model.

  2. The front-end: The blueprints from our prototype where changed and coded into a responsive web-app, this step allowed us to add animations, alerts & warnings, real-time calculations and multiple scenarios simulations.

With SIRI, designers can easily check their designs on our web-app, or they can ask for the minimum clearance to respect, etc…

Also, the FTI teams (Flight Tests and Instrumentation) discovered our project and started using it for on-site checks by using a specific offline version running on tablets.

As a result of right design, the new A350s are 200 Kg lighter than before, meaning + 2 PAX.

We had over 400 designers using it to build the A350XWB. It has been also used for checks and controls by the Flight Test Instrumentation during the production phase.

Next Steps

  • Extend the usage on other aircraft programs, other than the A350 XWB.
  • Build a service middleware to let CAD tools like Catia use the data directly and verify 3D Sketches on the fly.