HPC-Cloud-based optimisation of aircraft wiring

KEW, an SME founded in 2008, specialises in the optimisation of engineering-intensive projects in the manufacturing industry. In many companies with multidisciplinary development processes, unnecessary time, money and energy are wasted on activities that can easily be structured and automated. In particular KEW is active in the aerospace sector and has developed an application to optimise the routing of wiring within an aeroplane.

This is an important issue in the design of aircraft which traditionally has been addressed by trial and error. Although this problem can be tackled using computer models, applications to do this are very computationally intensive. SMEs generally do not have the available resources to buy and maintain, in house, the large computer systems needed to perform the necessary optimisations. Neither do they have the required expertise to use such systems.

The solution has involved porting the KEW optimization software to run on an HPC system and developing the necessary "glue" software to bring all the necessary software components together taking account of any software licensing issues. The successful implementation of this solution has enabled typical optimisations to be run on an HPC system much more quickly and effectively. It should be noted that this case study was the first time that KEW had used HPC in its wiring optimization.