Aerospatiale

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Contact:
Aerospatiale 37, boulevard de Montmorency -
75781 Paris cedex 16
FRANCE

Tools Used:
CORBA®, IONA's Orbix™

Description:
Fueled by the growing collaboration between organizations in the European aerospace and automotive industries, Aerospatiale, one of the leaders in aeronautical manufacturing, has used IONA Technologies' Orbix® to integrate the disparate Product Data Management (PDM) and Computer-Aided Design (CAD) IT systems used by European manufacturers.

The solution, developed as part of a pan-European initiative known as AIT-RISESTEP, was led by Aerospatiale and involved a consortium of key European industry players including BMW, Bull Information Systems, Caddetc, CSTB, Dassault Systemes, Gida, ProSTEP, Matra Datavision, Renault, Rover, and Volvo.

The AIT-RISESTEP initiative is based on two computer industry standards; STEP (Standard Exchange for Product Model Data) which facilitates the exchange of data between graphical and management applications and the CORBA® (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) software standard with Orbix, which enables different software applications to work together. The result is an integrated manufacturing solution that can be used in each partner location.

The AIT-RISESTEP project reflects the growing trend of cross-border cooperation in the European industry. With AIT-RISESTEP, the organizations involved identified the necessity for shared databases which can be accessed by a range of design, analysis, and management systems both locally and remotely via LAN, WAN, and remote links. To deliver the required solution, Aerospatiale and the AIT-RISESTEP consortium built an open standards framework based on IONA's Orbix. Four different client applications have been developed to highlight and examine different scenarios throughout the engineering process. With STEP and Orbix, PDM and CAD/CAM information can now be accessed and manipulated from a choice of platforms from leading IT vendors.

"The success of international collaborative agreements hinges very much on the ease and speed at which information can be shared and accessed among the partners," commented Nicolas Figay, CAD/CAM and PDM Systems Expert at Aerospatiale. "The AIT-RISESTEP project demanded an architecture capable of integrating a wide range of diverse PDMS (Product Data Management System) applications which were distributed across numerous platforms. IONA's Orbix offered the most scaleable infrastructure to fulfill this requirement. More importantly, Orbix was the only proven CORBA solution available on the multiple systems deployed across the twelve organizations."

"AIT-RISESTEP has proven to be a very successful part of the Advanced Information Technology (AIT) project which was funded by the European Commission's IT Programme, ESPRIT," commented Dr. Erastos Filos, Scientific Officer for Concurrent Engineering & Product Data Modeling at the European Commission. "The demonstrations at the Aerospatiale site were well presented and showed that clients can be developed to access a heterogeneous product data system using CORBA and STEP. Care must be taken that the competitive advantage achieved by this project is not lost".

"One of the key challenges facing organizations across the globe today is systems integration. The removal of trade barriers in Europe has heightened this integration challenge, as more and more organizations need to make their internal computer systems work in tandem with third party systems," commented Noel Toolan, Senior Vice President of Market Development at IONA Technologies. "The more partners involved in international engineering partnerships, the greater the risk and complexity in terms of achieving successful interoperability between different IT systems. However the successful deployment of Orbix in the AIT-RISESTEP project illustrates how collaborative business activities can benefit from a proven, open architecture which also protects their existing IT investments."

Aerospatiale is one of the world's leading aerospace companies with 37,000 employees. Aerospatiale has played a leading partner role in the design and manufacture of the AIRBUS family of Civil Aircraft, the ATR family (Regional Transport Aircraft), a wide range of helicopters from 1.5 ton to the 9 ton class within Eurocopter, ballistic and tactical Missiles and Space exploitation with ARIANE and Satellites.