Study of agile fixtures for aerospace industry

Abstract

Aircraft production lead-team reduction is considered essential to deal with the forecasted steep increase in demand for the forthcoming years. Consequently, automation has been considered crucial to achieve this goal but its application has not been as easy as expected due to the particularities of the aerospace structures and the introduction of fibre reinforced plastics components. A European project called LOCOMACHS was launched in order to found a cost-efficient solution for the current concerns by applying lean manufacturing principles. The current thesis refers to a particular tooling solution developed in this project and its assessment. An Hexapod has been conceptualized to handle the leading edge during its assembly. The development of this thesis has highlighted the necessity to evolve into a new manufacturing paradigm called agile manufacturing which adds flexibility to the traditional cost-time duality proposed by the lean thinking. Since this recent philosophy has been deeply discussed in literature but lacks of information regarding its assessment, a Tooling Agility Assessment Tool has been developed. This tool has been built over fuzzy logic in order to deal with the vagueness of the linguistic variables.