Study and application of aircraft configuration management

To meet the complication, diversification and serialization of modern aircraft, and to guarantee the consistency, integrity and trackability of product data during the process of aircraft digital design and manufacturing, the process of aircraft configuration management and control were studied. The importance of configuration management technology in the whole life cycle of aircraft design and manufacturing was emphasized and the definition of configuration was confirmed. While differences of configuration and BOM (bill of material) views were given, and the BOM views were EBOM (engineering bill of material), PBOM (process bill of material), MBOM (manufacturing bill of material) etc. Four key technologies of configuration management and control were proposed and analyzed referring to the simplified configuration management of being ideas. The four technologies were as follows: from drawing based to part based management, modularization of aircraft product structure items, simplified effectivity management by effectivity of module controlling the aircraft configuration, enhanced version control. The useful application solutions of these four technologies were given.