Comprehensive identification of aircraft coordination feature based on complete importance modeling and its engineering application

Purpose Coordination feature (CF) is the information carrier in dimension and shape transfer process in aircraft manufacturing. The change of its geometric size, shape, position or other attributes would affect the consistency of accumulated errors between two or more assemblies. To identify these “key characteristics” that have a close relationship with the assembly precision, a comprehensive method was developed under digital manufacturing environment, which was based on importance calculation. The multi-hierarchy and multi-station assembly process of aircraft products were also taken into consideration. Design/methodology/approach First, the interaction and evaluation relationship between components at different manufacturing stages was decomposed with a hierarchical net. Second, to meet coordination accuracy requirements, with the integrated application of Taguchi quality loss function, accuracy principal and error correction coefficient H, the quality loss between target features and candidate features at adjacent assembly hierarchies were calculated, which was based on their precision variation. Third, the influence degree and affected degree of the features were calculated with DEMATEL (decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory) method, and the concepts of centrality degree index and cause degree index were proposed for calculating the complete importance degree to eventually identify the CFs. Findings Based on the proposed methodology, CFs, affecting the skin profile and the flush coordination accuracy, were successfully identified at different assembly hierarchies to a certain type of wing flap component. Originality/value Benefit results for the engineering application showed that the deviation of skin profile was more accurate than before, and the tolerance was also closer to the centerline of required assembly precision range. Moreover, the stability in the assembly process was increased by 26.9 per cent, which could bring a higher assembly quality and an enhancement on aircraft’s flight performance.