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The Project

The Concept

Aeronautic and aerospace industries want to reduce product development times and costs but face a major obstacle: the need to build several physical prototypes for verifying various factors during the design process. Human factor considerations in the design process play a crucial role in the reliability and resilience of the systems involved, from an operational and error-tolerant point of view. The application of human task and cognitive workload analysis are significant for system design purposes; however, in current systems the analysis and the analysed artefacts are decoupled and implemented as separate entities. Such separation leads to high manual effort for integration (which might not done to the extent necessary to achieve deeper insights into the task at hand), while missing chances for automation and therefore cost reductions. Semantic representation of scene content and application entities is a necessity for several kinds of intelligent virtual engineering applications. Existing systems demonstrate initial results for integrating semantics into virtual environments; however, they do not implement a closed loop between semantics and 3D geometries, and generally suffer from scalability and real-time performance aspects.

Scientific & Technological Objectives

The i-VISION project aims at supporting human factors design and validation activities in aircraft cockpits, during the early phases of the product life-cycle through knowledge-based immersive virtual reality technologies. The project has three distinct and complementary scientific and technological objectives, briefly described as follows:

  1. Human-Cockpit Operations Analysis
  2. Semantic Virtual Cockpit
  3. Virtual Cockpit Design Environment

i-VISION, through a unique combination of research in the areas of human factors, semantics and virtual design, will enable designers and engineers to visualize, manipulate and interact with the digital mock up in an intelligent manner allowing for decisions to be taken very early in the design process and thus helping to reduce costly errors.

Expected Impact

 

i-VISION will deliver three distinct technological components that are integrated and validated together with the industrial partners:

•The Human-cockpit operations analysis module will act as the basis for the human task and cognitive workload analysis. •The Semantic virtual cockpit module will provide the semantic-based scene-graph architecture and management engine. •The Virtual cockpit design environment will be the advanced design environment for interactive and intuitive virtual prototyping of modern aircraft cockpits, facilitating knowledge-based simulation technologies.