AUTOMATING THE VERIFICATION OF GEOMETRIC REQUIREMENTS FOR AIRCRAFT FUEL SYSTEMS USING KNOWLEDGE-BASED ENGINEERING

Abstract

The definition of and compliance to requirements is one of the most important steps of the aircraft design process. For the aircraft fuel system, many rules and requirements exist in certification specifications and guidelines. As the fuel system is highly integrated with multiple other aircraft subsystems, its design is highly impacted by the geometric definition of the aircraft and the positioning of other subsystems. Therefore, it is important to carefully consider geometric requirements already in early design stages.

Although being a crucial step in the design process, checking all the requirements can currently be a difficult, tedious and time-consuming task for aircraft designers. This is especially the case in early design stages, since the designs generally change considerably and often. Therefore, this work aims to define a methodology to support aircraft fuel system design while taking geometric, functional, and certification constraints into account.

This paper presents a rule-based approach for the verification of geometric and certification requirements. We use the Codex (COllaborative DEsign and eXploration) platform, a modern framework for the creation of knowledge-based engineering tools, to model critical components and requirements for the fuel system and to automatically check the compliance with those requirements. Next to having the potential to significantly speed-up the design process, utilizing such automatic verification procedures reduces the burden of having to perform manual and repetitive tasks. By ensuring compliance with the requirements it can also reduce the amount of rework in later stages of the design process.