Design for Automation within the aeronautical domain

Worldwide air traffic has been increasing through the last years, and recent researches indicate that the demand for new aircraft will continue to rise over next few decades. Even today, aeronautical manufacturing involves a large proportion of manual labour which directly affects the production capacity of the industry. Thus, in order to meet the market demand and reach the dynamism that the industry must have to compensate the changes that are driven by customers, the automation of the production lines has become increasingly necessary to guarantee the competitiveness of the aircraft manufacturing companies. On this context, this work presents the development of a Design for Automation designing tool—DFAut—that aims at clarifying the automation requirements of a product at the conceptual design phase. Through this study, it has been verified that the use of the DFAut method has yielded automation requirements that were not feasible to be accomplished by a competitive product to the market. However, within the Integrated Product Design concept, the DFAut results could be adjusted to render the product automation configuration feasible. The DFAut tool has been successfully applied to the design of a wing box, and the results are fully discussed herein.