In the aviation industry it is conventional to reproduce aircraft passenger cabins by using mock-ups. These mock-ups are generally produced on a 1:1 scale and are arranged within a supporting structure which corresponds functionally to the fuselage structure of the aircraft. The mock-ups serve a number of purposes. First and foremost, they provide an accessible reproduction of the passenger cabin to be subsequently produced, the reproduction corresponding exactly to the passenger cabin to be produced on both a geometric and a visual level. For this purpose, the same materials, matched with respect to colour, are used for example for the floor, wall panels and roof lining as those which will be subsequently used in the final assembly process. In this way, the effect of the colour scheme and spatial design of the cabin fittings on the mood of potential passengers and/or crew can be tested. Furthermore, the creation of different mock-ups with different styling can facilitate the decision-making procedure of potential customers. The addition of fixtures such as passenger seats, galleys, toilets, luggage compartments and lighting equipment forms an environment identical to the cabin to be subsequently produced. This is a practical way of trying out different ideas in terms of fittings, for example different seating designs, and the way these fittings interact with potential passengers can be investigated. A further purpose of these mock-ups is to investigate and optimise the ergonomic interaction between the people involved on the one hand and the fixtures in the cabin on the other under realistic visual conditions. Corresponding findings can be achieved to a limited extent by purposefully studying appropriate drawings and/or by means of virtual reality, but only mock-ups on a 1:1 life-size scale provide a true indication of a customer's experience in the cabin. Mock-ups of the aforementioned type are consequently a necessary link in the chain of development of an aircraft cabin. However, a substantial drawback of mock-ups of this type is that a new mock-up has to be produced for every variant in terms of fittings. Since ever increasing numbers of fittings variants are required simultaneously for a particular aircraft type for the purposes of validation and verification, considerable costs in terms of labour and material are incurred. When a mock-up is no longer required, the majority of the material used, including the supporting structure, cannot be used for other purposes and must be disposed of. The above shows that the advantages of the aforementioned mock-ups are only useful for a small part of the activities to be carried out during the development of an aircraft passenger cabin. The use of these mock-ups basically applies to the development and optimisation of the appearance of cabin fittings. In contrast, the cabin equipment includes lighting, air-conditioning, communications, safety, fresh water, sewage systems, etc. The aforementioned systems are developed and optimised by conventional procedures using, inter alia, appropriate test rigs which are constructed separately independently of the respective mock-up. These test rigs are specific experimental set-ups which are accommodated in a fixed manner in testing sites or laboratories, depending on the test requirements, and have the function of identifying the properties of components, systems and cabin installations. For this purpose, special devices are integrated in these test rigs for detecting these measurement data and simulating the system environment. The individual test stands are connected to one another in part by means of an electrical or fibre-optic data exchange to fulfil functions to which a plurality of cabin systems contribute, the connections, which are determined by the spatial conditions, not being able to be constructed as originally intended, and therefore possibly resulting in part in unrealistic system performance. In order to avoid these drawbacks, systems which interact closely with one another are constructed once again in a fixed manner in another test rig with original connections. In some cases, supporting structures for simulating the fuselage structure of the aircraft are also required to construct these system-related test rigs. Devices for experimentally testing comfort-related requirements in particular in the cabin are used to determine whether specific defined requirements or specifications are satisfied. In isolated cases which are not known in the art, this is already achieved in actual mock-ups of fittings in which the visual impression of a cabin can be determined by developers and customers. The cooperation between a fittings variant with specific features for carrying out cabin functions, for example the interaction between one or more systems with fittings components, is not tested in this case. A substantial disadvantage of the test rigs described above is that a plurality of test set-ups are required to carry out individual system tests and to achieve system integration, thus resulting in high material and labour costs.
In addition, a large proportion of the material used, in particular for the supporting structure, cannot be used further in subsequent tasks. It is further disadvantageous that the individual test set-ups are installed in a fixed manner in a laboratory or a test hall, so it is not possible to move the test rigs for location-independent testing. It follows from the above that the field of application of the development of cabin systems for aircraft, insofar as it involves the reproduction of fittings and equipment for the purposes of reproducing complex physical processes and/or the validation of operability or comfort properties, represents a phase of aircraft development which requires a high degree of expenditure in terms of material and workmanship before the aircraft is actually produced.