Experience of Conceptual Designs and System Interactions for the Aircraft Cabin in Virtual Reality

The aircraft cabin is complex due to the large number of system components and their interactions with each other. Requirements and cross-system interactions are therefore not directly comprehensible or recognizable. This leads to long and incremental development times that can no longer meet today's rapid changes in social and economic needs. Therefore, a development environment is needed that prepares the metadata or results of both the heterogeneous disciplinary models and software tools for all experts involved in the design (engineers, developers, assemblers, suppliers, etc.) in an accessible and holistic manner. A digital development environment combining virtual reality (VR) with an end-to-end digital thread can meet this need. The use of virtual reality is intended to provide visual support and to show connections between the system components. This paper presents the development of a methodical process in which all information from the design process is transferred to VR. To handle the complexity of the cabin and its system, models are built using a model-based approach. The model-based design approach ensures data consistency between the various models and establishes an infrastructure that complements the vision of a digital thread. Moreover, the VR technology enables various new cabin designs to be iterated, evaluated, and optimized at low cost before the concepts are validated in a physical prototype. It can be used especially for the effective assessment of new technologies for the cabin. In addition, a virtual environment can improve the communication between the research partners because all observers can directly participate in the evaluation and optimization process. Finally, the VR creates a medium to prepare complex and abstract data structures in such a way that they can be even more ascertainable or processible by humans.