Open Competition - Information Technology (October 1999)

The Federated Intelligent Product EnviRonment (FIPER)

Sponsor: Ohio Aerospace Institute

• Project Performance Period: 11/1/1999 - 12/31/2003
• Total project (est.): $21,437,152.00
• Requested ATP funds: $10,707,720.00

Improvements in design technologies and processes have greatly enhanced product quality and reduced time to market in many industries. Competitive pressure to enhance quality further while reducing life cycle costs is creating a need for even more innovation in design. In a four-year project, a joint venture led by the Ohio Aerospace Institute will develop and demonstrate technologies that will transform the present serial design process to make it truly concurrent with manufacturing, thus reducing design time, improving quality, and potentially reducing the cost of creating new products. The Federated Intelligent Product EnviRonment (FIPER) will be an open software environment distributed across platforms and locations offering Web-based services that can be used in designing and making a broad range of products. Among the planned innovations, technology will be developed that links product requirements analysis to product geometry and automates design tasks. A central challenge will be to design an architecture that can fully integrate proprietary tools, including the three leading computer-aided design (CAD) platforms. In addition, knowledge-based systems will be designed to automatically revise component geometry in response to analyses of cost, performance, and producibility issues, which will be integrated into the knowledge base. FIPER demonstrations will focus on a jet engine, nacelle (shelter structure for the engine), and fuel nozzle. The other partners in the joint venture are the BFGoodrich Aerospace Aerostructures Group (Chula Vista, Calif.), Engineous Software, Inc., (Morrisville, N.C.), General Electric Aircraft Engines (Cincinnati, Ohio) together with GE Corporate Research and Development (Niskayuna, N.Y.), Ohio University (Athens, Ohio), and Parker Hannifin Corp. (Mentor, Ohio). The ATP funding will enable the team to develop and demonstrate a general solution for a range of applications and platforms; without this support, the technology would be proprietary and designed to address a limited set of problems. If the technology is successfully developed and later commercialized, team members project that the U.S. manufacturing sector could save a total of $2.2 billion annually.

For project information:

Vanessa Paris, (440) 962-3112
VanessaParis@oai.org

Active Project Participants

• Engineous Software, Inc. (Cary, NC)
  [Original, Active Member]
  
• GE Aircraft Engines (Cincinnati, OH)
  [Original, Active Member]
  
• Goodrich Corp. Aerostructures Group (formerly BF Goodrich Aerospace) (Chula Vista, CA)
  [Original, Active Member]
  
• Ohio University (Athens, OH)
  [Original, Active Member]
  
• Parker Hannifin Corporation (Mentor, OH)
  [Original, Active Member]
  

ATP Project Manager

Jack Boudreaux, (301) 975-3560
jack.boudreaux@nist.gov