Case Study: Airbus achieves smarter, more efficient aircraft manufacturing with National Instruments

Developing Smart Tools for the Airbus Factory of the Future

The customer, Airbus, faced the challenge of minimizing extremely costly human error during the complex, multi-step manual assembly of aircraft. To improve competitiveness, they needed to add intelligence to their shop floor tools and systems to simplify the production process for operators.

The vendor, National Instruments (NI), provided a solution based on their System on Module (SOM), which utilized NI Linux Real-Time and the LabVIEW FPGA Module. This platform allowed Airbus to quickly prototype and develop families of smart tools that could automate settings, verify actions, and log data. By using NI's technology, Airbus estimated that their time to deliver a solution was reduced to a tenth of the time required by alternative approaches, significantly accelerating their development process.

Airbus

Sébastien Boria

Airbus