Meeting the legal and business requirements of the aerospace industry

The LOTAR project has been initiated to provide solutions for the legal and business requirements in the context of digital product information preservation within the aerospace industry.

Demand for a digital technical product data archiving solution

A general demand for long term archiving all legal and certification relevant documents is a result of Aircraft Certification requirements of Authorities (JAR, FAA and others), national laws and legal practice concerning with product liability and guarantee. Therefore basic requirements independent from 2D or 3D product documentation are

• to ensure continued readability, authenticity and identity of the records,
• to demonstrate to the authorities proper functioning of the records system and
• to maintain the capability to retrieve type design data in a usable form over the validity period of the Type Certificate.

A specific demand for a CAD 3D master model, PDM data or engineering data archiving solution exists because nowadays the development of products is completely in 3D. The conventional way of archiving the product data is to derivate 2D drawings out of 3D models. This solution is very cost-intensive, 2D drawings are not reusable for the design process. Also the complete engineering know-how as the support of use cases like design reuse, support in operation, dismantling would be endangered by being linked to a native, proprietary data format. Endless migrations without a reliable reference would risk a producers know-how and potential.