Boeing's DreamAirbus' Nightmare

Baseline magazine has a l-o-n-g story titled, "The Promise and Peril of PLM: Boeing's Dream, Airbus' Nightmare".

They, like us, haven't been able to get much closer to finding out what caused the A380 design disaster, although there is a hint that another problem might have been tolerance data not migrating from CATIA V4 to V5.

The article, by Mel Duvall and Doug Bartholomew, provides some details on the use of CAD for Boeing's Dreamliner:

* data stored in a 16TB data warehouse.
* contractors update their data to/from the warehouse twice a week.
* all contractors have to use the same software (CATIA V5, etc).
* Boeing paid the contractors' cost in obtaining and supporting the software.
* all software is updated four times a year.
* a total of 150 software packages are being used for design and data handling.

(Thanks to Franco Folini for alerting me to this article.)

Comments

[Tony in SV]

I agree that tolerance data might be part of the problem - and in fact, specifying tolerances is one weakness in 3-D MCAD - it's not standardized (except maybe in STEP-NC). We do tolerancing in our 2-D Solidworks drawings.

But there's a hint at a different problem:
"The engineers' "notes"—appendices that describe details of models such as curves—sometimes are not replicated in the translation between Catia V4 and V5, ... In other words, key notes required to duplicate a 3D model showing electrical wires as they twist and bend through the aircraft may fail to reappear in full and accurate detail when a design file in one system is converted to a file in the other."

I'm not sure how you model wiring harnesses in CATIA V4 or V5, but if it's different, that could be another part of the problem.

Anybody have experience doing 3-D models of wiring harnesses?
--Tony