A decade ago, it took many years for a spacecraft to move from the 'drawing board' to the launch pad. The time to market period has now decreased to approximately two years and has to be shorter.
Delmia Corp, a Dassault Systemes company today announced that its systems are to form part of space manufacturer Astrium's digital product realization strategy. Tightly integrated with its sister product Catia, Delmia is to be deployed on the company's new and ongoing programs. A decade ago, it took many years for a spacecraft to move from the 'drawing board' to the launch pad.

The time to market period has now decreased to approximately two years and there is continuing pressure for further reductions despite dramatic increases in the size and complexity of projects.

Astrium therefore decided to investigate ways to reduce delivery risk, cycle times, and costs.

With help from leading universities, the Delmia toolset was evaluated as part of an overall digital design for manufacture initiative.

This benchmarking and best practice study focused not only on the various products and their associated process capabilities within the virtual factory or zone, but also on how best to implement the different tools so they could directly improve profitability in the context of product life cycle management.

This is known within Astrium as a Design Anywhere, Build Anywhere strategy.

Elfed Roberts, Systems Manager at Astrium says, 'We knew right from the beginning that we did not want to implement Delmia 's various virtual assembly tools as just a 'point solution'.

Though our thoughts on how both Envision and Ergo could be made to work for us altered over the course of the study, as the systems continued to develop, we knew that they could be used to both capture and manage a 'knowledge based' approach as well as affect unambiguous communication.

This approach also has the effect of being able to drive standardization and common processes at multiple sites and in multiple countries.' 'Telecoms space craft tend to be large one off complex structures with limited opportunities for standardization.

With Delmia, we will be applying kinematics and logistic-type simulations at the highest level, stretching these systems to their limits,' says Roberts.

'Using universities active in this field has helped us to evolve novel design-for-manufacture solutions.

Only by understanding the philosophy that underpins Delmia and Catia could we begin to harness their capabilities to maximize the added value potential to Astrium.

Everyone has been talking about the benefits of product life cycle management for some time.

I am confident that Delmia will enable us to achieve far higher levels of design maturity much earlier in our programs and hence, mitigate risk more effectively than was previously thought possible.' 3D PLM enables customers to optimize their business processes for engineering, manufacturing, maintenance and Ssupport, by utilizing Collaborative Workspaces to share a common product, process and resource (PPR) model.

With PPR, companies can capture, share and reuse Knowledge all along the Product lifecycle.

The open CAA V5 (Component Application Architecture) allows extension and integration of this solution within multiple enterprise environments.

Delmia provides a comprehensive software solution and expertise for customers to virtually create, monitor and control agile, distributed manufacturing processes geared towards Build-to-Order and Lean Production practices.

The Delmia software suite is containing an alphanumeric and 3D-driven process planning, standard time measurement applications, human being simulations, robot and machine tool simulation as well as solutions for layout generation and material flow simulation.

Such software allows development, screen-based simulation and optimization of manufacturing processes for single device, work cell, production line, and factory material flow up to Extended Enterprise production flow.

Applications range from concept development phase to shop floor implementation and production management.

The Delmia range of simulation software packages integrates behavior models to be used in simulation, analysis, programming and control applications.

Delmia offers state-of-! the-art technology to design factories on-screen, before actually building them.

Delmia serves industry segments where continuous transformation and optimization of the manufacturing processes are critical such as Automotive, Aerospace, Fabrication and Assembly, Electrical and Electronics, Consumer Goods, Plant and Shipbuilding.

Delmia constitutes the core offering for digital manufacturing and Production, serving the product life cycle.

Delmia solutions are interoperable with major CAD, PDM and ERP systems.