In today's competitive market place it is important for manufacturers of aircraft parts to be able to respond quickly to the demands of your customer. This requires flexibility and speed in the development of new or redesigned aircraft parts. One way to achieve this is to develop Knowledge Base Engineering (KBE) tools that shorten the design and production lead-time. In this paper a KBE tool is described with which geometry of moulds used for rubber forming of thermoplastic composite movable ribs can be generated. This KBE tool is part of a larger Design and Engineering Engine of an aircraft movable. The KBE tool uses information stored within the tool to generate the mould geometry and information about the mould. People not familiar with mould design can operate the KBE tool, making mould design a cheaper and, because the mould design is automated, less time consuming process. The knowledge stored in the tool consists of expert knowledge on the positioning and sizing of critical features of the rib mould. This knowledge is transformed from raw knowledge into practical design rules and practical models. Finally the models and knowledge are packaged in a KBE tool. The KBE tool consists of several features that together form the rib mould. Negative or positive mould can be modeled by changing just one input parameter. The features needed for using the mould in the rubber forming process are also positioned using user-defined parameters. This results in a tool that is flexible but fast in generating rib moulds. Generation of a rib mould typically costs 2 minutes.@en

Fast generation, analysis and optimisation of concepts is key to innovative for aircraft parts design. Supporting design and analysis by KBE tools is one of the possibilities to achieve this. In this paper a method is described with which structural models of aircraft movables can be generated using a KBE tool. This tool consists first of all of parametric definition of the movable family has been implemented in the ICAD environment. This implementation consists of a tool, which generates the geometry of and information about a movable based on methods stored within the tool and inputs provided by the user. The geometric lay out of the movable can be easily adjusted by changing the input parameters used for generating the model. The information that is generated by the tool is used in the second part of the KBE tool: the transformation of the geometrical model of the movable to a structural model. This transformation consists of segmenting the movable model into easily mesh-able surfaces and storing information about material properties of and loads on the movable in text files. The geometry, stored in IGES files, and the text files are using a FE pre processor, in this case Patran, to generate the FE model of the movable. In this way FE models can be generated of movables of different configurations in a quick, time savings of up to 80%, and consistent way.@en

The BRP ParMod will result in the set up of a Design and Engineering Engine (DEE) for generic aircraft. The DEE is intended to show industry how to significantly reduce the amount of recurring work by using Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE), without making compromises in design flexibility.@en