Aerospace System Unified Life Cycle Engineering Producibility Measurement Issues

摘要

The goal of the Unified Life Cycle Engineering (ULCE) program is to develop enhanced design environments that will allow supportability and producibility to be considered early in the product design cycle along with the usual factors of cost, performance, and schedule. An investigation into methods for the incorporation of producibility issues in early design is reported in this paper. Producibility is a product characteristic inherent in its design denoting ease and economy of manufacture. Many aspects of producibility are judgmental in character. However, to design products that are properly balanced with regard to all of the ULCE design factors, these qualitative aspects of a design must be handled and methods of trading off such factors against quantitative factors such as performance and cost measures must be developed. This paper discusses methods of measuring and evaluating factors related to producibility and presents a plan for the development of a design environment of an aerospace design synthesis model with a producibility module. Included is a description of relevant design and manufacturing methodologies (e.g., Design for Manufacture and Assembly, Taguchi methods, Quality Function Deployment, Statistical Process Control) and a discussion of the kinds of tools (hardware, software, and attitude) that can and have been established to ensure strong producibility characteristics in a product. In addition, an extensive bibliography is provided in an appendix.