Detailed simulation of military aircraft operations and logistics

摘要

Over half the life cycle costs of a weapon system goes toward supporting it after delivery. Since the costs of acquiring new weapon systems increases every year, support costs and ways of reducing them are receiving greater attention. Currently, the Department of Defense is spending $24 billion a year to operate and maintain previously procured weapon systems. Consequently, the Air Force is now asking aerospace firms to contract for support elements; for instance, failure rates, maintenance man-hours expended per flying hour (MMH/FH), spares costs, depot overhaul frequencies, system availability, sortie rates and 10-year operations and maintenance costs. Thus, when we design a new aircraft system, we are now obligated also to predict support elements and costs before the first aircraft is constructed.

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One way of helping us predict these support elements and costs is through a simulation model. Experience shows that effective simulation programs are not developed quickly. Therefore, we in The Boeing Company approached model design and development as a research project with the idea to develop and maintain an operational and logistics simulation capability that could be adapted to varied aircraft systems with a minimum of programming revision.

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This paper describes the resulting model which is programmed in GPSS/360 (General Purpose Simulation System) and is called GOALS (General Operations and Logistics Simulation). I would like to emphasize that the GOALS model is out of the development stage. It is an operational model, and has been verified against actual Air Force operations.