Gathering, evaluating and managing customer feedback during aircraft production

This paper proposes a systematic approach for gathering requirements during production through customers’ remote access to the partially and fully assembled aircraft and its modules. The paper also proposes an evaluation and management of these recorded requirements and their utilization in the development of an aircraft. Modular product architecture is used for the modular organization of the product, product-service, and production system for the gathering, evaluation and management of feedback for product development perspectives. A mobile and wearable augmented reality system is used to virtually walk through the partially or fully manufactured product and to compare the status of the production with the product model to be produced. Change requests are captured as customer feedback. The knowledge thus acquired can be overlaid (augmented) on the real product, i.e. the aircraft. This approach is able to record the dynamic requirements of targeted customers. These changes can be carried out in the current version of the aircraft, and also incorporated into future versions. The implementation using case studies is presented for gathering feedback during assembly as well as for evaluating and managing the recorded feedback for exemplary modules (cabin and galley) of an aircraft. The use of the evaluation results in the development of an aircraft is also presented in the paper.