CFMS supports Rolls Royce’s COLIBRI AI consortium

The COLIBRI project – Collaboration Across Business Boundaries – is a 11-partner consortium, led by Rolls Royce, to help reduce product development cost and time-to-market, two major challenges that need to be addressed in order to maintain the UK’s global competitiveness.

The three-year, £18m COLIBRI project will capitalise on the expertise of each of the partner companies to improve design and automation by introducing machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) into the design process. This is expected to enhance model-based systems engineering, and develop design capabilities for engine architecture. It should also help to enable digital threads with better modelling techniques.

As part of the project, which is co-funded by the Aerospace Technology Institute and Innovate UK, the partners will develop a range of ML- and AI-assisted modelling tools and methods for design improvement and the generation of new and model geometrics. More specifically, CFMS is investigating how regulated industries that require configuration control, traceability and repeatability can use AI systems in production and still conform to the certification rules governing the sector.

Configuration control across the business processes are particularly important in safety critical industries, such as manufacturing, where there is a need for products or processes to be produced and certified. New machine learning and data science tools present new challenges around data management alongside software and models, requiring the development of new MLops approaches that will be explored in this project.

CFMS joins Rolls-Royce and 9 other consortium partners on the COLIBRI project: Aircraft Research Association Ltd, BAE Systems Ltd, Cambridge Flow Solutions Ltd, GE Aviation, International TechneGroup Ltd, MBDS UK Ltd, Queen’s University Belfast, University of Cranfield and the University of Southampton.