Digitalization Of Production At Aerospace Enterprises: What A University Graduate Should Know

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problems of forming the educational policy of aerospace universities in Russia, taking into account the implementation in the country of the program for the development of the digital economy and the development of an end-to-end life cycle management system based on the Digital Enterprise platform. In addition to traditional design and technological training, university graduates must have the knowledge and skills to work with the software of a digital enterprise. Federal state educational standards do not regulate the construction of the educational process for the study of technologies and processes implemented in digital production. Therefore, universities should independently formulate educational policies in this area. For this, at the first stage, it is necessary to analyze the current state of the digitalization process of aerospace production. The article provides a brief description of the software of aviation enterprises – partners at the Komsomolsk-on-Amur State University, which trains personnel for them. The “Digital Enterprise” program is implemented at airlines as a complex of interacting informational 3 subsystems: computer-aided design, PLM lifecycle management and an electronic document management subsystem operating within an automated system on a single software and hardware platform. A brief overview of the composition of the digital enterprise software platform is given. It is noted that universities widely use computer-aided design programs (CAD), Computer Aided Engineering programs (CAE), Computer Aided Process Planning (CAPP), Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM), which replaced the drawing board and calculator in the course of coursework and diploma projects.

Keywords: Digitalization, aircraft producers, university, software, engineer

Introduction

The requirements for the level of training of a specialist in the aerospace industry remain unchanged. Traditionally, this is due to the complexity of the design and manufacture of aircraft. In recent years, a new factor has emerged – digitalization of production (Baranov, 2017; Krivosheev, 2017; Lockett et al., 2014; Qianping et al., 2015; Tertyshnik, 2013; Zhou et al., 2011).

The term "digital production" refers to the information environment of high-tech production, covering production technologies, new materials and providing information and organizational support for production (Avaliani & Dzhenko, 2018; Bykova et al., 2015). This environment includes information about all processes in production:

• design and technological documentation;
• production indicators and data on its quality;
• logistic operations;
• operational parameters;
• economic indicators.

Problem Statement

Since 2016, the Russian Federation has been implementing a digital economy development program and developing an end-to-end life cycle management system based on the Digital Enterprise platform (Avaliani & Dzhenko, 2018; Kochura et al., 2017; Sazonov et al., 2018). The goal of the program is to increase labor productivity at enterprises of various industries in Russia. In particular, for aircraft-manufacturing enterprises, with their multi-level structure and a large number of technological processes, the digitalization of the production environment should lead to technical re-equipment, a reduction in the resource intensity of technological processes, the implementation of modern management methods (Manturov & Efimova, 2012; Shabalkin et al., 2014).

In the process of training aviation specialists at universities, there is an uncertainty of information required for the development of educational programs and curricula for specialized training. This uncertainty is associated with the lack of a priori information about the participants in the interaction, with the complexity of relationships, the impossibility of describing the system using traditional methods, the predominance of qualitative information, as well as with the ambiguity of assessing certain phenomena.

Research Questions

Komsomolsk-on-Amur State University belongs to the group of universities, which have opened aerospace departments focused on training personnel for local enterprises in the industry. The advantage of the educational process in such universities is the integration of the educational and production environment, in which the professional competencies of future specialists are formed. As a rule, the educational process in senior courses for two to three days a week takes place directly at the base enterprises using production or training and production equipment with the implementation of final qualifying works on real topics.

Purpose of the Study

Research Methods

The specialized software was analyzed according to its functional characteristics: CAD systems, PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) systems and electronic document management systems. The list of CAD software is shown in Table 1.

The list of PDM software, ECM systems and electronic document management systems is presented in Table 2.

Findings

The software used by the aircraft manufacturers is quite diverse. The developers are both local and international IT companies.

Conclusion

The analysis of the composition of the software used in the digital enterprise showed that at present, the universities widely use computer-aided design programs, i.e. CAD (drawings and electronic models), CAE Computer Aided Engineering (engineering calculations), CAPP (Computer Aided Process Planning) (development of technological processes), CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing, programs for CNC machines) from the Table 1, while the programs for PDM, ECM systems and electronic document management systems are not studied enough. This is explained by the fact that in the curriculum a large proportion is occupied by coursework and diploma projects on the design and production technology of aircraft, for which computer-aided design programs have become a modern natural and universal toolkit for calculating and building electronic models of individual parts and assembly units, replacing the drawing board and a calculator. Programs that implement the technology of product lifecycle management PDM, ECM-systems and electronic document management systems are highly specialized tools, the study of which is possible only within the framework of the relevant special disciplines.

References

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