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Tag: concurrent

  • Working in the Concurrent Design Facility

    Working in the Concurrent Design Facility

    Massimo Bandecchi speaks about the work being done in ESA’s Concurrent Design Facility (CDF). The CDF is a state-of-the-art facility equipped with a network of computers, multimedia devices and software tools, which allows a team of experts from several disciplines to apply the concurrent engineering method to the design of future space missions.

    Interested to work here as a trainee? Vacancy posts for Young Graduate Trainees (YGTs) go online once a year in mid-November, and stay open for one month. About 80 YGT job offers will open, aimed at engineers, physicists, biologists or medical graduates, but also business graduates and lawyers.

    More information on our Careers website:
    http://www.esa.int/About_Us/Careers_at_ESA/Young_Graduate_Trainees

  • The Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) – An Innovative Teamworking Method

    The Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) – An Innovative Teamworking Method

    Traditionally, engineers faced with the task of designing a new, complex system or structure – a car, an aircraft or a satellite – work sequentially, one step at a time, passing the design from engineer to engineer. This is inefficient and consumes time and resources.

    For more than a decade, many of ESA’s sophisticated spacecraft have been designed with the help of the CDF, making use of very advanced iterative techniques – hence its title ‘concurrent’.

    Concurrent engineering puts all related engineers, with all their brain power and required tools together with the final user representative – or customer – in the same location at the same time. This allows for iterative design at a fast pace, with customer and designers agreeing requirements and taking decisions in real time to ensure the best design for the right cost and an acceptable risk.

    This process has been developed and honed so it is now common to produce a risk assessed conceptual space mission design complete with various options and including scheduling, testing and operations in a matter of weeks.