Virtual commissioning for aerospace
Traveled work does not go away. It moves down the line with the aircraft. We arrive with sequences, paths and safety logic already validated against the station twin, so the station clears its pulse with the work finished.
Traveled work doesn't disappear. It moves down the line with the aircraft.
Work that leaves its station unfinished travels, and on a certified article it becomes a nonconformance. The cause is usually not the part but the station's behaviour, first exercised with the aircraft already inside. When the rails come off for the next unit, the test starts over.
Spirit AeroSystems disclosed in its Q1 2023 results a $31M full-year gross-profit impact from "disruptions and rework" at its Wichita factory, alongside $43.3M of excess capacity costs in the quarter. That was a part-quality problem, not a control-logic one. The economics of finding out late are the same.
What transfers is how we validate.
That behaviour is nobody's deliverable: jigs from one company, automation from another, your plant running both. We make it ours: PLC, robots, safety and the electrics, proven against the station's twin before the station exists. Our record is automotive; aerospace gets the method.
Every station fails in its own way.
-
Drilling and fastening
One bad path over a finished skin is a scrapped part. The paths arrive collision-free, and the interlocks have already fired a thousand times in the model.
-
Panel and aerostructure assembly
Skins, stringers and frames from different suppliers meet in one cell, and their first assembly should not double as their first integration test. The robot, PLC and safety handover is settled beforehand.
-
Moving line and final assembly stations
Takt is hours here, not seconds, and a missed pulse is where traveled work is born. The full sequence runs end to end before there is an aircraft to run it on.
-
Tooling and reconfiguration
Rails come off and go back on around each aircraft, and every rebuild leaves the station unproven. The reconfiguration is rehearsed virtually while the station keeps working.
The aerospace station already runs on robots, PLCs and a clock.
-
Airbus automates the drilling, and publishes it
Airbus runs its Flextrack and MSDR drilling robots in the A320 ramp-up, on rails assembled and disassembled around the aircraft. The station we rehearse is the station they publish.
-
Boeing paces its stations with a takt clock
Boeing's own wing-assembly patents define the pulse: an advance, a pause, a takt time assigned to each step. The clock is already written down.
-
A Spanish tier-1 sells on cycle times
Aernnova sells its assembly on a "moving line philosophy", with automated drilling and riveting cells achieving "highly competitive cycle times". The flow argument is the sector's own, not ours.
Sources: Airbus, Robotics (airbus.com), where the MSDR covers 87% of all pre-assembly-line drilling needs; Boeing patents US8661684B1 and US11919661B2 (Google Patents); Aernnova, Aerostructures (aernnova.com). Virtual commissioning applied to aeronautic assembly is documented in peer-reviewed literature: "Virtual Commissioning Implementation Of Industrial Aeronautic Assembly Process".
Ten standards that weren't ours teach you how to enter the eleventh.
-
We adapt to your standard, not ours
We have programmed inside ten different OEM standards: naming, block structure, diagnostics and documentation to the programme's rules, not to ours. Which is why yours isn't a problem.
-
Robot and PLC, one team
The station ships whole. Signals between robot, PLC and safety are mapped and tested together, not in two projects that first meet on the floor.
-
The people who program are the people who start it up
The same team that proved the station against its twin is on site through acceptance testing. No handover, no explaining the line twice. The work stops traveling.
Our expertise is automotive: ten OEM standards delivered, among them VASS5 and VASS6, BMW and Daimler Integra Wave 6, with more than 400 validated PLC architectures and more than 1,000 robots programmed.