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AIRBUS Improves Ring Flight Testing Efficiency with ODH
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Aerospace
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
Services
- Data Science Services
The Challenge
The AIRBUS flight test program is a key component of aircraft development. Every part in every possible configuration must be tested in as many scenarios as possible. This creates multiple types of data, all in different silos — plane configuration criteria, flight data criteria, flight event behaviors, crew reports, and other unstructured content criteria. Historically, each test flight required manual research into previous tests to create a set of specific requests, and the effort to leverage data to optimize those new flight tests was considerable. While a lot of data was generated during testing, AIRBUS’ process to search within the data in order to simply retrieve a specific condition and its result was a slow, manual one. And, flight test environments are constantly changing, with a series of maneuvers done at specific locations, which meant that traditional data approaches couldn’t keep up with this complex data challenge.
About The Customer
AIRBUS is a European multinational aerospace corporation. As one of the world's leading aerospace and defense companies, it operates through three divisions: Commercial Aircraft, Defense and Space, and Helicopters. The company produces and markets the first commercially viable digital fly-by-wire airliner, the Airbus A320, and the world's largest passenger airliner, the A380. The company has primary manufacturing facilities in France, Germany, Spain, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The company relies heavily on flight testing for aircraft development, creating a vast amount of diverse data that needs to be managed and analyzed efficiently.
The Solution
AIRBUS needed to integrate all the test data from the multiple data sources to enable them to find a historical test that matched the exact parameters needed to support the specific parts and components they were testing. They then needed to be able to quickly search through existing flight data to see if a certain flight test had already been completed to reduce duplicating tests and speed the development of new tests. With MarkLogic’s Operational Data Hub (ODH), they were able to integrate the diverse data, map those data points to the aircraft parts and components of each tested aircraft, and then search across that data to find test data with precise queries, including specific conditions, locations, components and temporal patterns in sensor data.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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