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Aircraft development projects at Bombardier Aerospace involve a large number of tasks executed by a network of professionals from various disciplines. As the complexity of products and the development process increases, it becomes more difficult to manage the interactions among tasks and people. In fact, it may be impossible to even predict the impact of a single design decision across the development process. At Bombardier, investigation has shown that there was a lack of communication between design processes when dealing with aeroelasticity information. This resulted in duplicated design effort, reduced quality, and increased time to complete tasks when small design changes from one task induced delays in other tasks. Processes that deal with aeroelasticity work integrate system inertial, aerodynamics and structural information to make aircraft models and perform analyses. These processes have been creating similar models to perform aeroelasticity analyses.

This paper presents a control system for the thermoforming of large sheets. The system has three main purposes: Its primary purpose is for cycle-to-cycle control of the sheet temperature map as predicted by the thermoforming simulation. Its secondary purpose is to tune the simulation to the actual process through on-line characterization of some of the material and machine characteristics so that the simulation's predictions are reconciled with the machine sensors outputs. Lastly it can characterize on-line a number of independent and fast acting sub-models that allow for in-cycle control of some process parameters.