virtual product development

Configuration management is a key task in scope of product development processes of passenger aircraft. Business processes as well as methods and IT tools of virtual product development are facing top-level demands in this industry. This paper provides background information with respect to configuration management in aerospace industry. Furthermore, it discusses challenges resulting hereof for aircraft manufacturers.

During the last years, marketing of products via the Internet became more and more important for both customers and manufacturers. However, most products sold today cannot be customised to satisfy the buyer’s individual requirements. Configuration functionality incorporated in current ERP systems as well as industrial product development software addresses the problem of fully automated design of products according to specification. However such extensive functionality is difficult to implement, requires extensive resources to run and a large part of its costly features offers no added value in an e-commerce context. E-commerce and the Internet in general pose a number of specific requirements as e.g. lightweight simple design, good scalability, interactivity, user friendliness etc. In order to meet these demands, a new method of configuration has been developed. This method focuses on non-automatic, interactive, user-friendly configuration of product variants based on a simple yet ...