Two of Europe's leading avionics companies are collaborating with Aerospatiale in a programme backed by the European Commission (EC) aimed at improving the ability of system suppliers to work together.
The concurrent engineering project, one of several centred around the proposed Airbus A3XX, has entered the demonstration phase and is due to be completed next year.
Known as Specification Procedures for Industrial Distributed European Realisation of Systems (SPIDERS), the programme is aimed at new projects, particularly the A3XX, to allow systems suppliers to work together.
SPIDERS is designed to negate the disadvantages inherent in European collaborative projects, according to the EC, particularly considering the nature of European industry, which it describes as "geographically distributed and culturally diverse".
Brian Rawnsley, systems design engineer with project partner Smiths Industries, says that the aim is to achieve a "20-30% lead time reduction". He adds that as 30% of new aircraft cost is in systems, "-hundreds of millions of dollars in savings are promised" by the new approach.
The partners, which also include Sextant Avionique and project co-ordinator Aerospatiale, met last month to decide on "who does what", says Rawnsley, although details are confidential. Concurrent engineering is a central theme of EC research funding efforts.
Source: Flight International
