Impact assessment of design guidelines in the conceptual development of aircraft product architectures

Abstract The optimization of the assembly phase, in complex products, is a challenging phase and it need to be handled in the early phase of product development (i.e., conceptual design). Several methods have been developed to assess the assemblability of product at the conceptual design phase, however, the most critical aspect concerns the possibility to derive design guidelines starting from the results of assemblability analysis. In this context, the present work aims at defining a methodology able to retrieve design for assembly and installation guidelines starting from the analysis of a given product architecture at the conceptual design phase (loop-back of the design for assembly method). The developed method makes use of matrices and vectors to provide a list of design actions that affect the product assemblability including a ranking of their impacts on the final design. The methodology was used to retrieve and select design guidelines in the context of aircraft manufacturing. The case study (cabin equipping of commercial aircraft) provides interesting results in the identification and implementation of design guidelines to improve the aircraft architecture at the conceptual level.