Improving aircraft assembly coordination process planning in china with CBR (case-based reasoning)

Purpose. Up to now, aircraft assembly coordination process (ACP) planning in China is still done manually. We now present a method to do such planning in China that utilizes CBR. Some difficult questions (such as excessive assembly errors, part repair, remanufacturing or redesign) make it very complex to plan ACP aircraft product. Our method, which utilizes CBR, can exploit fully successful past experience of Chinese aircraft ACP planning engineers and answer difficult questions very efficiently, thus shortening time-to-market and reducing manufacturing cost. Our method mainly includes the following three aspects; (1) building case library of ACP and defining query case; (2) designing an algorithm for searching needed assembly coordination cases; the key points of this searching algorithm are searching process and four similarity degrees (SDs); the first SD is important assembly coordination location SD; the second SD is assembly coordination approach SD; the third SD is assembly allowance requirement SD; the fourth SD is assembly benchmark SD; (3) retrieving and reusing assembly coordination case. Finally we give a simulation example of an aircraft wing. We plan its ACP using 7 steps. The fourth step is the most important and includes; (1) calculation of the four SDs between query case and each of the similar cases in ACP case library; each set of four SDs is synthesized into one composite SD; (2) we can select the best similar case by noticing the maximum composite SD. Thus our method can offer high efficiency in ACP planning of aircraft product.