Best Supply Chain, Manufacturing and Aircraft Systems Identification leveraging a Model-based Product Line Engineering Approach

Abstract

Public perception of aviation increasingly emphasizes climate change, sustainability, and efficient travel. The Flightpath 2050 initiative reflects this by aiming for climate neutrality, global leadership, and societal responsiveness. Achieving these goals requires a fundamental shift in the way aeronautical systems are designed, especially in the integration of manufacturing and supply chain considerations early in design. This paper aims at formalizing aircraft, manufacturing and supply chain requirements while proposing a methodology that applies the Product Line Engineering (PLE) approach to prepare for value-driven trade-off analysis considering, at the same time, production and aircraft performance. Therefore, once collected requirements, variations of the systems for system (aircraft, manufacturing and supply chain) architectures are generated in SysML with the support of a feature model which focuses on their variabilities (e.g. materials, processes, enterprises), leading to different performance (e.g. cost, mass). The best architecture is then identified by leveraging the value-model theory. An aeronautical case study demonstrates the benefits of the proposed methodology application.