Capturing the assembly process planning rationale within an aerospace industry

Aerospace is a knowledge intensive industry. The knowledge is dependent on the legacy systems and approaches within the industry. The industry has developed a core competency in aerostructure assembly in the UK. This competency has been developed over many years and from vast experience. This has resulted in a particularly knowledge intensive product development process and placed great dependency upon this knowledge base. The paper presents a framework and methodology to capture assembly process planning rationale for aerostructures within an aerospace company.