Identification of Key Factors in Integrating Aircraft and the Associated Supply Chains during Early Design Phases

Abstract

The aerospace supply chain network has evolved over the years to become more complex and essential to a company’s success. Traditionally, the supply chain considerations are brought in after the design has been finalized. However, this no longer represents a sufficient practice to satisfy today’s market demand and meet the challenges inherent to the design and production of a new aircraft. This paper discusses the need to bring supply chain considerations and constraints earlier in the design process. It presents a new framework to establish and analyze the interrelationship between aircraft design and supply chain design. In particular, this paper aims to identify the significant factors linking the two disciplines during the early design phases. To do so, the authors leverage the Manufacturing-Influenced Design (MInD) methodology that generates and integrates manufacturing knowledge early into aircraft design. They further extend this methodology by integrating a supply chain model in the form of a mixed-integer programming with linear optimization that minimizes the total time-discounted network costs. The supply chain costs in turn provide additional criteria and constraints to the selection of aircraft designs. The aircraft design traits of the work breakdown structure (WBS), material selections, and the bill of materials (BoM) are all inputs to the supply chain model. Demand, production years, material unit cost, transportation unit cost, and labor rate are supply chain related inputs. Design of Experiments (DoE) and surrogate modeling techniques are then leveraged to generate aircraft performance as well as supply chain outputs. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to gain more insight into the key factors and their implications on real-world design decisions. Areas for future research are outlined at the end of the paper.

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