By moving to an emulated system, this helicopter manufacturer could make design changes in hours rather than days.

Background:

A military spec helicopter is an amazingly complex machine comprised of thousands of cables each with a critical function. Devising the ideal layout with optimal routes for each cable is a mammoth task that is difficult – and imperative – to do accurately. Over many years, Anglo-Italian helicopter company AgustaWestland developed and refined a VMS application for this purpose that helped it to set the industry standard in terms of accuracy.

The problem:

Although the VMS application helped make AgustaWestland a leader in its field, it worked very slowly. It required 48 hours to work out the appropriate cable routes, meaning that any design changes had to be accumulated over the week and applied each weekend.

The result:

Swiftmigrate recommended an emulated VAX system to improve the application’s performance. The migrated system is many times faster than the original and is able to calculate cable routes in hours rather than days. It can even be run during production, meaning that updates take a maximum of 24 hours to apply. The result has been so successful that AgustaWestland are now exporting the technology.