MSID Highlights 4_01_10

MSID and the Department of Defense (DoD) hosted a technology demonstration workshop for DoD maintenance depots at NIST from April 12th to April 14th. The focus of the workshop was on how government maintenance and production facilities might be able to take advantage of Model Based Enterprise (MBE) technologies in their manufacturing and facilities planning activities.  Attendees included representatives from Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA, and the Defense Logistics Agency.

During the course of the technology demonstration, representatives from all three major Computer Aided Design/Product Lifecycle Management (CAD/PLM) software providers demonstrated their functions for manufacturing planning, using an engineering change request scenario developed by the DoD digital depot team. Demonstrators used the Bradley Fighting Vehicle cross drive transmission that was modeled by Red River Army Depot for their Digital Depot project. The demonstrations provided insight on leveraging technology to improve processes.  

The test case scenario was intended to demonstrate a typical production scenario that could be planned and managed utilizing production planning software.  A demonstration of the ease at which a Manufacturing Bill of Material (MBOM) is created utilizing geometry provided by Design Engineering. Once the MBOM is created, the planner defined processes operations and required resources. From these processes, routings and work instructions were created. Electronic notifications were directed to departments where Numerical Controller (NC) programs and tooling will be needed. Also, an MBOM spreadsheet was automatically outputted that could be transferred to Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) systems thus eliminating a manual re-entry process. Once the manufacturing process was demonstrated, demonstrators showed how revision changes are handled.  All operations, routings and work instructions, were required to be updated according to the effectivity defined in the scenario.  

Among the presentations given, Deo Kibira, MEL Guest Researcher, gave a presentation on the status of the DES assessment support project. He introduced the nature and importance of using computer simulation; and explained various application domains, including manufacturing, where simulation modeling has played a major role in improving operations, and the criteria for selecting a particular simulation software. He presented the Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) comparison table, which compares sixteen DES software applications, explaining the various elements and contents in the table that were collected and summarized from different sources including software manuals, home pages of the applications of developers, and direct communication with the vendors.

POC: Simon Frechette, 301-975-3335
Program:  Model Based Enterprise
Category: Interaction