Reverse Engineering for Aeronautical Products:

Reverse Engineering (RE) is an activity that consists in digitizing a real part in order to create a numerical or virtual model. Main industrial finalities of RE consist in manufactured parts control, CAD models redesign, and finally product data retrieval in database. RE technologies helps to maintain the integrity of digital models and more generally of enterprise data through the products lifecycles. The aeronautical context presents several challenges for RE activities, such as large database of CAD models, complex shape and structures of the parts, and restrictive constraints on the products definition. Thereby, RE activities for aeronautical product requires a specific framework along with efficient geometry processing and knowledge management tools. This article deals with the study of RE related works presented in the literature in order to identify knowledge limitations and technological gap when considering specific constraints and challenges related to aeronautical systems. A general method based on optimized associated tools is proposed as a Reverse Engineering solution for Aeronautics.