Life Cycle Simulation Support for Functional Products

Business to business cooperation is undergoing large changes, resulting in new requirements on how to develop products, and thereby forcing companies to optimize their part of the total product system. Aerospace business agreements are being made on a life cycle basis where the actual product ownership often remains with the manufacturer. Revenue for aero engine manufacturers and their engine programs appear late in the engine life cycle, not during market introduction when large discounts are common. An engine developed for the sale of spare parts is not optimized for the owner. The key when owning and producing engines is to develop engines with a minimum life cycle cost. As the development of functional (Total Care) products includes the development of both hardware and accompanying services, people from all areas and their knowledge will be needed in the decision-making. This will be especially important in conceptual engineering design phases where knowledge of the design requirements and constraints is usually imprecise and incomplete and where few support tools to support this phase exist. Knowledge Enabled Engineering includes Knowledge Based Engineering and other knowledge rich strategies, and aims to support or perform engineering activities with the help of available techniques and methods. The Knowledge Enabled Engineering approach presented here embeds methods used later (downstream) to simulate the effects making information readily available early on. Numerous decision support systems exist where knowledge from a few disciplines has been modelled. However, this is not enough with a life cycle focus. The basis in early decision-making requires knowledge from all phases of the product’s life cycle. The presented work shows how a decision support system can be used to capture and present knowledge extracted from performance, manufacturing and maintenance activities, creating a better foundation for making decisions regarding life cycle issues. The described method shows a way to simulate business scenarios and its product solutions based on a technical basis normally found later (downstream) in the product development process. Also shown is how a decisions support system can be used to capture downstream knowledge from design, manufacturing and maintenance activities, thus allowing the effects of the life cycle to be already simulated in the conceptual phase. Engineers can then change the design and directly assess the life cycle cost also in the conceptual phase allowing fast iterations, and thereby design the life cycle of a product based on knowledge from design, manufacturing and maintenance disciplines. Optimization in a global perspective will allow the right decision to be made in the early phases with a clear understanding of how life cycle issues are affected depending on the choices made.