Sustainment Optimization Analysis Program (SOAP)

The Army maintains extensive data sets to document historical and current field experience with in-service aircraft.  These data sets reflect current aviation fleet performance under austere conditions all across the globe. Engineering, logistics, and maintenance organizations use these data sets as inputs to guide decisions about engineering and sustainment planning, forecasting supply chain actions, mission planning, and maintenance management. The sustainment simulation used for this process is a manual system that requires maximum effort to produce limited results. AVNIK Defense Solutions, Inc. proposes, with our subcontract team members Instrumental Sciences, Inc., a software toolset, called Sustainment Optimization Analysis Program (SOAP) to modify and optimize existing sustainment analysis methods. The new SOAP toolset will automate the development of creating data input values for the legacy SoSAT model, the process of using the legacy SoSAT outputs to create Key Performance Parameters (KPPs) and the optimization of sparing levels and locations to achieve desired KPPs.  The SOAP toolset also manages the configuration control and archiving of data related to SoSAT model events, its intermediate trial results, and other metadata.  Primary objectives of the Phase 1 effort are:  1) Identify aviation platform life cycle metrics KPP/Key System Attributes (KSAs), such as Materiel Availability (Am), Operational Availability (Ao), sparing solutions, O&S cost, Maintenance Man-Hours (MMH), Maintenance Ratio (MR), Depot loading to be optimized; 2) characterize the results of the current SoSAT sustainment simulation; and 3) design, demonstrate and evaluate candidate AI algorithms for optimization.