A Data Mining Environment for Management of Ground Testing of the A400M Aircraft

One hundred development and certification ground tests must be performed before the A400M aircraft's first flight. Ground testing is an essential but also expensive process performed by the Airbus Defense and Space (Airbus DS) Company in the manufacturing cycle of an aircraft. This process involves the repetition of a large group of tests due to failures (known in the terminology of the company as “incidences”) in the testing. One or more incidences in a test imply that it will be repeated, which requires a significant investment of resources and time by the company's engineers. In this article, an innovative decision support environment to manage the ground testing sequence is presented and a data mining analysis of the testing time and the trend of test incidences is included. The core application, developed in R language, is supported by an easy-to-use customer web application using the Shiny environment. The environment was used to analyze real-world cases of tests to be performed by Airbus DS, producing a useful decision tool for company experts to evaluate the ground testing sequence. It is currently in the last stage of testing by the Airbus DS ground test staff using real-world data.