Apr 26, 2022
About the Customer
Engineering Industries eXcellence’s Engineering Industries eXcellence team is leading a multi-site Simulation & Data Science digitalization project that will transform military aircraft repair across the United States. The customer is an Aerospace & Defense Manufacturing leader that provides material support for aircraft and airborne weapon systems to the U.S. government. The customer’s repair sites, which overhaul and retrofit military combat planes, are critical to defense fleet availability. Our team is delivering 3D simulation models for the customer’s main repair sites to help them ensure efficient maintenance processes, quick turn-around time and superior flight readiness for national defense.
- Aerospace and defense manufacturing
- Digital defense and homeland security
- Defense fleet maintenance and repair
- Government manufacturing
The Customer’s Need
Continuously seeking ways to improve their fleet repair and maintenance processes, the customer has identified a number of challenges across their sites that they want to address:
- Aging capital equipment across multiple layers of operation that could lead to critical quality or throughput capacity issues;
- Environmental factors which cause delays in maintenance delivery;
- Inefficient transportation of assets between buildings and workstations;
- Under-utilized workforce due to process inefficiencies;
- Fleet repair process bottlenecks.
The customer called in our Simulation & Data Science team to deliver a solution that would help them operate at the highest levels of quality and efficiency. To achieve this, our experts decided to leverage simulation modeling to create virtual replicas of each facility and simulate how they operate in the digital world. Each digital model, or Digital Twin, was built using Siemens Tecnomatix Plant Simulation, which enables the simulation, visualization, analysis and optimization of industrial facilities and processes. These models also play a key role in providing the necessary data to drive decision-making for future investments.
About the Project
In order to accurately recreate the customer’s operations on a virtual landscape, our Simulation & Data Science team first conducted on-site visits to multiple facilities to gather knowledge about existing resources, people and processes. After completing the assessment and the gathering of requirements, our team built a master Digital Twin to act as a template to build upon for other facilities. In this way, the reusability and flexibility of the main template will maximize the return on investment (ROI) of the customer’s investment in simulation. Specific modifications can now be made to personalize the simulation template to the unique needs of each site in scope.
Once built, statistical analyses on gathered information will run on each model to replicate complex processes and operations for efficiency studies. The customer’s optimized processes will be set up as experiments to be reported out from the simulation, and the documented results will help the customer identify opportunities for improvement in efficiency, productivity, quality and capital investment.
- On-site requirements gathering and process assessment
- Digital Twin creation at each facility with site-specific modifications
- Replication of complex processes and operations for efficiency studies
- Customer uses results from simulation to identify opportunities for improvement
Engineering’s Advantage
The biggest advantage of the Digital Twin template we delivered is its high configurability. Rather than having to create specific models for each site, our Simulation & Data Science team will now use the original model as a global template and implement it at other sites, applying changes to each model so that they accurately reflect each facility’s unique requirements. Having all their vital information within these simulation models will give the customer even more insight into cross-site opportunities and cost-benefit analysis, while also providing them with a larger scope to view the entirety of their operations. The customer chose Engineering Industries eXcellence because we offer the best Simulation & Data Science solutions across the Digital Thread for Industry 4.0.
- Track record of successful model delivery for highly complex environments
- Technical knowledge and skills required to implement Digital Twins
- Strong relationship with customer and understanding of their needs
- Expertise in Siemens products and aerospace manufacturing
