Factory Analytics and Decision Support for Resilient Manufacturing (FADS)

Aircraft maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) ensures the continuing airworthiness of aircraft or aircraft parts. Aircraft MRO is extremely costly: the U.S. Air Force spends about 70% of lifecycle costs to sustain, versus acquire, its aircraft. The goal of our project is to develop advanced factory analytics and decision support to lower the cost and improve the performance of MRO activities at ALCs. During this proposed project, we will work closely with managers, planners, analysts, and others at WR-ALC to refine our understanding of current and planned propeller overhaul operations and equipment maintenance, including planning, scheduling, management, and control. We will prioritize candidate problems and specify requirements for a factory analytics and decision support tool (FADS). We will iteratively develop three versions of the tool, incorporating user input and feedback to design/enhance each version. Identified problem areas and possible capabilities include production and maintenance situation awareness, manufacturing system design exploration, product flow design and control, disruption and inefficiency assessment and mitigation, context-aware maintenance scheduling, and supply and parts management. The tool will incorporate a collection of methods and techniques, including data visualization, mathematical modeling and analysis, interactive and stochastic simulation, and scheduling.