Visual Production – strategic manufacturing system development tools for aerospace industry

Paper in proceeding, 2011

This paper addresses the strategic development of complex aerospace production systems with an approach based on visualisation techniques. The core issue is how to manage a large variety of product mixes in different phases of their life-cycle. Many virtual manufacturing tools are, or can be used. However, there are many gaps in terms of what tasks the tools can support as well as lack of integration between different tools. The conclusion is that they don’t provide a complete picture and decision support. A distinction can be made between 1) analytics-based tools for deterministic system optimization; and 2) combinations of sets of visualizations for human expert decisions combining data that is difficult to integrate. This paper describes the Visual Production project. It is based on the second approach and is developing a demonstrator of the combination and augmentation of a high-precision realistic model of the real manufacturing system and additional simulations and information models to increase fidelity and usability of the combined visualization of the manufacturing situation. The expected effects are e.g. increased efficiency and effectiveness during development and increased decision support capability by visualizing different perspectives in collaborative expert teamwork.