Selection of materials systems for aerospace applications, such as airframes or propulsion systems, involves multiple and challenging requirements that go beyond essential performance attributes (strength, durability, damage tolerance, and low weight). Materials must exhibit a set of demanding properties, be producible in multiple product forms, and demonstrate consistent high quality. Furthermore, they must be both commercially available and affordable. The list of materials meeting these requirements is not long. Integration and transformation of such highly engineered materials into airframe structures is likewise complex. The Boeing 747, for instance, requires more than 6,000,000 components from numerous materials systems and suppliers worldwide. This necessitates that materials be stable and that material design and structure engineering close on effective solutions simultaneously. High-temperature turbine engines demand strong, lightweight, high-temperature materials balanced by high durability and reliability in a severe service environment. Such applications provide remarkable examples of how engineering imperatives influence materials research and development for metallic and composite materials in terms of material chemistry, fabrication, and microstructure.

In co-operation with an Austrian small sized company, the Institute for Handling Devices and Robotics at the Vienna University of Technology started a project with the goal to reduce the time necessary for planning, programming and set-up of robot equipped manufacturing cells. In this contribution a modular, object-oriented control system for robotized cells is presented. This system ‘C_CTRL' is responsible for all necessary tasks, like sequencing, supervising, controlling of basic functions, error handling, and recording of statistic data. The control system is ‘self-generating' during program start-up – using hardware information from a simple ASCII configuration file. Regardless which and how many components used in a particular cell, there is no additional programming effort for generation of the entire control software.