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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.

Ground testing is an essential process in the manufacturing cycle of an aircraft. Testing requires a large investment of resources and time on the part of the engineers of the company. It is common for failures to occur during the different tests during this process. Our group at the Electronic Technology Department of the University of Seville (Spain) worked with the Airbus Defense and Space Company (Airbus DS) to develop a framework for the prediction of failures (known in the terminology of the company as “incidences”) generated in the ground testing of the A400M aircraft. The prediction models are generated through a data mining process with the simulated data registered by the company on its testing process of the previous aircraft. In addition, the framework not only predicts incidences but also suggests changes in the test parameters so that these incidences will not occur again in future aircraft. A battery of tests on real cases was carried out to validate the different models. The success rate of the models was 87.5%, which is considered a good result by the company. In addition, the changes suggested by the framework to ensure that the incidences did not reoccur were studied and executed by Airbus DS in the tests. Currently, based on the framework developed with simulated data, Airbus is using the framework with the actual data of its aircraft.

Industrial distributed control continues the move toward networks at all levels. At lower levels, control networks provide flexibility, reliability, and low cost, although perhaps the simplest but most important advantage is the reduced volume of wiring. Powered fieldbuses offer particular notable benefits in system wiring simplification. Nevertheless, very few papers are dealing with the potentials and limitations in power distribution through the bus cable. Only a few of the existent fieldbus standards consider this possibility but often simply as an option without enough technical specifications. In fact, nobody talks about it, but power distribution through the bus and conducted noise disturbances are strongly related. This paper points out and analyzes these limitations and proposes a new low-cost fieldbus physical layer that enlarges power distribution capability of the bus and improves system robustness. We show an industrial application on water desalination plants and the very good results obtained owing to the fieldbus. Finally, we present electromagnetic compatibility test results that verify improvements against electrical fast transients on the sensor/actuator connection side as disturbances usually encountered in harsh-environment industrial applications.