• Ended projects



Duration: 36 months

FP ref.: 6th FP
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FRESHimg

From Electric cabling plans to Simulation Help

Project objectives

  • To reduce time to design aircraft electrical harness.
  • To maintain and overhaul electric cabling by a smart system.

Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems have paved the way, in the past twenty years, for cost reductions in aircraft design; new cost reductions are foreseeable from an extension of the CAD capabilities. In the specific case of the electrical distribution of power supply on an aircraft, the CAD systems generate wiring plans. Then the electrical harness is designed from the wiring plans. A new step forward needs to be accomplished in order to automatically design and optimise the harness itself; this is the expected technical achievement of the FRESH project.
The technical research goal of the FRESH project is to focus on new technologies acquisition in order to convert automatically wiring plans into harness simulation.
The project addresses not only CAD designed aircraft but old aircraft as well. For not-CAD designed aircraft, a part of the proposed research will focus on methods to automatically capture paper plans and transfer them in a numerical form, on like CAD. Doing so, the whole fleet of aircraft is taken into account.

Large manufacturers have expressed interest in the FRESH system; they are expecting:

  • electrical harness optimisation capabilities
  • cost reduction in industrialisation
  • cost reduction in modification design and validation

SMEs have as well expressed interest in the progress expected from FRESH. The most concerned ones are those working in the aircraft maintenance sector. The expected benefits are:

  • fault free recapture of wirings diagrams
  • significant reduction of wasted time, 50% is our target: we consider that the manual recovery of a wiring diagram plan takes several hours or days, according to its complexity
  • error free intervention. Presently, errors are detected most frequently during the installation, what engages extra-costs in overhauling (one error out of a hundred is detected after implementation)

Expected results

The FRESH expected project aims at increasing the productivity of the design and maintenance teams in charge of the harness by a global 15%. The aircraft safety level will be kept up without over-cost thanks to the strict verification and validation carried out by the simulation (no reengineering iteration).


  • Design of an automatic simulation of performance behaviour for the electrical harness. The simulation system will embed all the design phases from the aircraft definition of wiring plans (Computer Aided Design or paper plans) up to the simulated harness.
  • Positive impacts are foreseen on the aircraft life cycle cost:
    - optimisation and validation of harness design (aircraft design and production cost)
    - safety assessment, of the whole cabling, requested modification or enhancement (cost of aircraft modification).
  • maintenance and overhauling smart system (maintenance cost)

Disseminated documents

Adobe Reader
FRESH presentation (pdf - 290 Ko)

WP1 Specification
D 1.1 Basic specifications (pdf - 117 Ko)

WP2 Recognition
D 2.1.1 Report on cleaning, thresholding and preprocessing methods (pdf - 91 Ko) D 2.1.2 Acquired algorithms and associated SW prototype tools (pdf - 75 Ko) D 2.1.3 Image thresholding (pdf - 299 Ko) D 2.2.1 Report on image segmentation (pdf - 209 Ko) D 2.2.2 Specification of the image segmentation method & relevant SW prototype tool (pdf - 112 Ko) D 2.2.3 MMImock-uprelevant to this sub-activity (pdf - 128 Ko) D 2.2.4 Consideration on recognition for "dynamic-sized" equipment component (pdf - 169 Ko) D 2.3.1 Final report on text recognition (pdf - 131 Ko) D 2.3.2 Processing tool and method for human intervention (pdf - 97 Ko) D 2.3.3 Dictionary (structure, semantic, I/O processing) (pdf - 29 Ko) D 2.4.1 Intermediate report with first interactive prototype (pdf - 261 Ko) D 2.4.3 Specification for identification and recognition of symbols and associated software prototype tools (pdf - 80 Ko) D 2.4.4 Semantic knowledge database populated with relevant information (pdf - 38 Ko) D 2.5.1 From paper document to CAD method (pdf - 164 Ko) D 2.5.2 CAD/CAM data structures modelled with UML (pdf - 126 Ko) D 2.5.3 Integration tools and SW prototype tool (pdf - 193 Ko) D 2.5.4 MMI mock-up (pdf - 134 Ko) D 2.6.1 Justification file for the knowledge DB (pdf - 594 Ko) D 2.6.2 Intermediate report and enriched semantic knowledge base (pdf - 129 Ko) D 2.6.3 Final report and enriched semantic knowledge base (pdf - 123 Ko)

WP3 Pivot
D 3.1 Modelling of all the objects of the PIVOT universal language via UML modelling (pdf - 89 Ko) D 3.2.1 Identified objects converted in the PIVOT language to be used in the CAD software (pdf - 81 Ko) D 3.2.2 Tools and algorithms able to convert files into PIVOT language (pdf - 86 Ko) D 3.2.3 Algorithms and UML diagrams to convert CATIA files into PIVOT (pdf - 106 Ko) D 3.3.1 The DTD file which defines the XML model structure (pdf - 68 Ko) D 3.3.2 Reading and writing the XML data (pdf - 83 Ko)

WP4 Harness
D 4.1 Document presenting the MMI and relevant MMI mock-up (pdf - 140 Ko) D 4.2 The framework and the pattern (pdf - 80 Ko) D 4.3 Man Machine Interface of the harness geographic plan (pdf - 230 Ko)

WP5 Simulation
D 5.1 Harness components modelling (pdf - 93 Ko) D 5.2.1 Tool for models management (pdf - 196 Ko) D 5.2.2 Graphical User Interface for generation of model from block diagrams (pdf - 391 Ko) D 5.7.1 Validation of simulation results (pdf - 134 Ko) D 5.7.2 Reference data files (pdf - 95 Ko)

WP6 Prototyping and validation
D 6.1 Validation report (pdf - 216 Ko)

FRESH FR3-TV report on Algo'Tech website

Partners websites

ESTIA LORIA ALGO'TECH CEIT RECTOR ZENON TEKEVER DRAWINGS EURO INTER

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