Advanced Technologies for Discrete-Parts Manufacturing

Defense Procurement/Maintenance agencies are facing growing challenge of maintaining aging Warfighter Systems and ensuring mission readiness for global commitments, while reducing procurement costs of discrete-parts. One key hindrance to ensuring readiness is discrete part procurement. When procuring parts, tech data package which is provided to the suppliers during pre and post-award contains raster drawings. Several suppliers do not provide bids because information in raster drawings is almost unreadable. Furthermore, it requires them to expend considerable time to develop 3D models from these drawings, which raises procurement costs. For this reason, suppliers are not motivated to consider new technologies or alternatives that could potentially lower cost as opposed to conventional processes. Imaginestics proposes research and commercialization in 1) Development of automated system to convert geometry from raster drawings to 3D CAD model 2) Extraction of manufacturing related attributes from raster document and using converted 3D model to search for similar parts to learn alternative manufacturing processes used, relative cost range and complexity factors 3) Development of part/product universal modeling language to capture and relate manufacturing domain knowledge According to DLA’s internal survey, commercialization and deployment of above proposed R&D will reduce procurement cost of each discrete part by almost 27%.