A Holistic Approach to Manufacturing System Design in the Defense Aerospace Industry

This is a AIR FORCE INST OF TECH WRIGHT-PATTERSONAFB OH report procured by the Pentagon and made available for public release. It has been reproduced in the best form available to the Pentagon. It is not spiral-bound, but rather assembled with Velobinding in a soft, white linen cover. The Storming Media report number is A788604. The abstract provided by the Pentagon follows: Manufacturing has evolved to become a critical element of the competitive skill set of defense aerospace firms. Given the changes in the acquisition environment and culture; traditional "thrown over the wall" means of developing and manufacturing products are insufficient. Instead, the development and manufacture of air and spacecraft require much more interaction between the various functions. Also, manufacturing systems are complex systems that need to be carefully designed in a holistic manner and there are shortcomings with available tools and methods to assist in the design of these systems. This thesis proposes and validates a framework to guide the manufacturing system design process. The exploration and validation activities used 14 case studies from major aerostructures, electronics, launch vehicles and spacecraft. Actual manufacturing system design processes were observed real-time or captured retrospectively. An evaluation tool was used to compare the actual manufacturing system design processes with the process proposed by the framework. This degree of congruence with the framework was then compared to a metric of actual/planned performance of the manufacturing system. The results of the framework congruence versus the actual/planned performance metric showed that the case studies that were able to meet their planned performance also had manufacturing system design processes that resembled the process proposed in the framework. But the results also illustrated the different traits between the cases that were able to meet their planned performance and those that were not.