Managing aircraft lifecycle complexity

Abstract

A thorough analysis of data on aircraft lifecycle revealed inadequacy of current lifecycle management methods in the face of increased complexity of the Internet-based global market. A new method for managing lifecycle has been developed by authors and their teams using concepts and principles of the emerging complexity science with the aim of reducing lead times and costs. Centralised control has been replaced with distributed decision-making empowering all lifecycle stakeholders. The solution described in this paper is the first of its kind and it represents a genuine advance in knowledge, which leads to considerable reduction in design/production lead times and decrease in the lifecycle cost. The method has been validated in a variety of applications. Keywords: aircraft, complex adaptive systems, complexity, lifecycle management, real-time spare parts management. INTRODUCTIONThe lifecycle of a large aerospace product such as an airliner or a military aircraft consists of a very large number of interconnected activities, which are normally partitioned into several phases such as: Design, Production, Operation and Decommissioning. Each phase of the lifecycle consists of activities as outlined below.Design consists of all activities needed to produce, operate and recycle a product, including: market research, requirements specification, conception, design management, overall design (including design for X, where X is performance, safety, reliability, operability, manufacturing, assembly, maintainability and recycling) and design of components.Production includes the selection and development of production technologies, production planning and management, supply of materials and components, manufacturing, assembly, testing and quality assurance.Operation includes the scheduling and management of the use of aircraft and its crew within a fleet; the maintenance and repair tasks and resources; and the logistics support tasks and resources.Decommissioning includes safe disposal and recycling of components and/or materials. The current practice is to consider each phase of the lifecycle separately managed by a different team of specialists, often from different organisations, with a limited interaction between them. As a rule, there is no central lifecycle management team charged with coordinating all activities from the creation of the idea of the future product to its disposal and recycling. Moreover, each phase of the lifecycle is normally supported by stand-alone computer systems, such as computer-aided design, computer-aided engineering, computer-aided manufacturing, enterprise resource planning and various production and logistic schedulers, which are rarely fully compatible with each other and never integrated into a single lifecycle system.Partitioning of lifecycle activities into individual phases and managing each phase by different management systems supported by stand-alone computer systems weakens important connections between key lifecycle activities and thus delays useful flow of information, p...

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