Simulation of an Aeronautical Product Assembly Process Driven by a Metrology Aided Virtual Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper “Simulation of an aeronautical product assembly process driven 2 by a metrology aided virtual approach” presents a case application of assembly assisted by measurement with quite limited insights on the metrological issues concerned.

While  Metrology is devoted of the science of measurement and applications, this industrial in-development process is framed in the second chapter. As per the scope and topics of the journal, “basic metrological concepts such as uncertainty evaluation and traceability … are the natural background and requirement for all contributions”.

1. The title reflects sufficiently the content of the paper. The redaction in English is easy readable. The abstract contains superflows justification of the assembly assisted by measurement in the post covid19 time, since the techniques is by far a previous research and development field. In this sense, a state-of-art about the topic for a paper that describes an industrial development should be a priority to support properly the scientific background that the paper do not contribute.

 From the classic works of Daniel Whitney or derivatives like

 Mantripragada, R., & Whitney, D. E. (1999). Modeling and controlling variation propagation in mechanical assemblies using state transition models. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 15(1), 124-140.

Or more recent contribution that in fact deal with the technical problems of uncertainty and traceability that is expected (at least in the background, state-of-art and References):

Zhehan, C., Fuzhou, D., & Xiaoqing, T. (2013). Research on uncertainty in measurement assisted alignment in aircraft assembly. Chinese Journal of Aeronautics, 26(6), 1568-1576.

Gai, Y., Zhang, J., Guo, J., Shi, X., Wu, D., & Chen, K. (2020). Construction and uncertainty evaluation of large-scale measurement system of laser trackers in aircraft assembly. Measurement, 165, 108144.

2. The paper mentions the capabilities of sensoring tooling in an overall assembly aided/automated system, while those state-of-art systems already exist in industry. Again a proper approach and effort to reflect the state-of-art should be the first objetive to complement the partial preliminary results of an ongoing industrial development.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFtY1rvwetc

3. The absence of proper detail in the uncertainty contributions in the process reduces the content of the paper from a case study to a mere description of an industrial development. Giving details of the uncertainty contributions in the initial part fabricación of the reference holes, the uncertainty in the mirrors, or the fabricated tooling itself with respect to the interface drawing should be an asset to consider the exposition in the field of research, beyond the industrial applications. The 1000 simulations under GUM might be insufficiently justified, so in some of the formers references at least 10000 are used and theoretically one million is a priori part of a rigor application of MCM.

4. As a research objective, the paper should outline the scientific contribution. Even when the scope has ben properly limited:

“The article describes the assembly process pipeline in detail to understand the cons and the pros of the suggested novel assembly process and how the external metrology framework is collaborating with it to guarantee the quality request”.

There is no novel assembly process itself. The differences with other approaches found in literature should be explained to susstain such a novelty.

5. Since the actuator have a 0.1 mm resolution (pag 3 line 131, called positioning threshold, that in fact becomes uncertainty in the overall process), in the budget of uncertainty to be under 0.15 is hard to image that the rest of contributions present in the process become under 0.05 for a serial process.

6. Fig 1 and Fig 6 and Fig 15, at least, should be improved in its readability/graphical resolution, since beyond its illustrative purpose, give direct appreciation of the description about the device modelled in CAD.

7. The statement “The presented sequence is a basic simplification of the real process which is much more complex,…” In the view of this reviewer this sentence might be valid for a product presentation but no for a technical/research paper intended for expert people that should appreciate/analyse the contribution. Theoretically, if a procedure is proposed, the detailed description should allow reproducing the proposed method.

It would recommend a deep revision of the state-of-art with extensive support in former literature contributions and a proper traceability approach (product, tooling, laser tracking and data fusion), together with a detailed uncertainty contribution budget based on real hardware.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper proposes Simulation of an aeronautical product assembly process driven by a metrology aided virtual approach. In general, this paper is well presented. The following issues can be further considered.

1. More background and motivation of this study can be added, in case the readers are not very familiar with the topic.

2. The descriptions of the well known knowledge can be properly reduced.

3. Why introducing the virtual assisted approach for product simulation? What is the major benefits compared with traditional methods?

4. Some related works on this topic should be reviewed, such as "Data privacy preserving federated transfer learning in machinery fault diagnostics using prior distributions", "Universal Domain Adaptation in Fault Diagnostics with Hybrid Weighted Deep Adversarial Learning", etc.

5. A couple of ablation studies should be added to evaluate the effects of the key parameters of the proposed method on the performance.

Author Response

See attached document with responses

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Some partial modifications have been implemented without modifying the basic content or improving the overall contribution. The usefulness of this description of an industrial application would be assessed by the readers.

Reviewer 2 Report

comments addressed