Abstract:

System engineering has the characteristics of art and science because good system engineering requires the creativity and knowledge of systems engineers, but it also requires systems management or the application of a systematic disciplined approach. The design passes successively from one technical domain specialist to another. Lack of communication can cause incorrect assumptions being made and the main system parameters are not monitored in real-time. This method reduces the opportunity to find interdisciplinary solutions and to monitor progress at a system level. An improved method is centralised design, where the various technical domain specialists provide subsystem design information and data to central team of one or more system engineers. Although there is central monitoring at the system level, this process is time consuming due to the many iterations required. Concurrent Engineering (CE) offers an alternative to the classical approach and it provides better performance by taking full advantage of modern information technology (IT). Experts from various disciplines are co-located and communicate in real-time and face to face. As a result of many disciplines being integrated in the design process, the concurrent approach has been proven particularly effective for complex systems design.

Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) is an IT environment allowing multidisciplinary experts to interact and collaborate on one design project. Applications of modern information systems enabled fundamental improvements to the system engineering process through the use of real time concurrent engineering. Many design teams have demonstrated savings in time and cost compared with the traditional process for systems conceptual design. Many industry and academic research institutes are developing and implementing their own CDF. In aerospace engineering education, CDF can be invaluable by enabling student teams to gain cross-discipline skills and at the same time stay at the cutting edge of technology. This paper gives an overview of CDF configurations in use at different industries, research organisations and universities around the world and concludes with a proposal for a relatively a low cost CDF framework based on cloud computing which is particularly suitable for aerospace engineering education.

Keywords:

Design education, concurrent design, collaborative design.