Object-Oriented Discrete Event Simulation Modeling Environment for Aerospace Vehicle Maintenance and Logistics Process

Abstract

The operations and support (O&S) activities of aerospace vehicles involve the maintenance process to repair and replace broken parts and the logistics system which replenishes spares in the inventory. O&S cost represents the majority of the vehicle life cycle cost, and there are various research efforts focused on reducing it. Improvements to maintenance and logistics systems are expensive to perform in real life, so creating a modeling and simulation (M&S) environment capable of analyzing these systems allows for the testing of efficient changes. These systems operate on well-defined procedures and rules, and they can be modeled using discrete event simulation (DES). A DES environment, Virtual Environment for Operations and support Process Simulation (VE-OPS), is being developed for maintenance and logistics analysis using an object-oriented programming language. Generic class variables are defined for simulation objects such as vehicles and for maintenance and logistics process steps such as vehicle assessment and repairs. In the simulation, the vehicle and part objects are passed from one process to the next. This environment structure provides flexibility to tailor the model to specific applications while reducing the burden of recreating it for different projects, and by using an open source language such as Python, it can be shared with other researchers and freely deployed on multiple machines.

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