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The development of the Electrical Wire Interconnection System, or EWIS, for today's advanced aircraft is one of the most complicated engineering activities around. In addition to having to respond to very high rates of change during development, the aircraft are continually evolving in electronic and electrical content through their entire lifecycle. Relatively new mandates, such as the CFR Part 25 Subpart H EWIS, have put additional demands on aircraft OEMs and their key suppliers, forcing companies to reassess their design practices and methodologies. This paper investigates how a systems engineering approach to the development of the electrical wiring systems can enable and facilitate a more efficient EWIS development and maintenance methodology.

Meeting aerospace configuration control mandates involves a host of issues such as data access control, configuration context and release management, just to name a few factors. Currently, many companies rely on the existing product lifecycle management (PLM) environment to identify and sort out issues during data release. This has proven to be inadequate. In this paper, it is postulated that new design tools employing automation can save a great deal of time when meeting these mandates and eliminate errors as well. The tools are based on the model-based development (MBD) process, which puts much more emphasis on the actual data instead of simply drawings. This paper explores how leading aerospace original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are adopting new capabilities for the designers during the development process in an effort to mitigate errors related to data inconsistencies.

Until recently, the electrical systems architecture that connects hardware devices and their accompanying control components were not separately a part of formal certification mandates. This changed with the advent of the FAR Part25 Subpart H EWISi (Electrical Wire Interconnection Systems) mandate. Interestingly this mandate, like certain others, does not impose specific solution. Instead it provides a structure that outlines what must be accomplished from a variety of perspectives - safety, signal separation, part selection, etc. The designer has some flexibility on which decisions to make, but those decisions can have significant cross-domain impact, which in turn, have influence on the intended product performance. What is needed is a method to design, verify and build virtually the entire electrical architecture with confidence that the best architecture is defined within the program constraints.