Automated production system simulations using commercial off-the-shelf simulation tools

A multi-year research project focused on a global aerospace company's design-to-production transition, and in particular how to answer production-related questions much earlier in a program's design cycle than is possible today. A fundamental difficulty is that the time and expertise required to formulate appropriate analysis models prevents their routine use, especially in new program development. The project's goal was to reduce these requirements, and by late 2014 a methodology had been developed for on-demand analysis generation to answer routine questions about production systems. A pilot project was conducted in 2015 to demonstrate efficacy, that an implementation of the methodology could in fact reduce by at least an order of magnitude the time required to answer a frequently-asked question, in a repeatable way while specification of the products, their process plans, planned facilities, and available resources were frequently changing. This paper summarizes the methodology, its pilot project implementation, and preliminary results.