Using Discrete Event Simulation In Multiple System Life Cycles To Support Zero-Defect Composite Manufacturing In Aerospace Industry

Visual inspections performed by operators are very time-consuming in the manufacturing process of carbon fibre parts in aerospace industry. In the EU research project ZAero (Zero-defect manufacturing of composite parts in the aerospace industry) in-situ manual inspection on fibre placement stations thus shall be replaced by automatic inline inspection. To quantify the improvements of the suggested process changes, a series of experiments performed by a discrete event simulation (DES) model was needed to provide necessary key performance indicators (KPI). As the new inline inspection detects events and provides a lot of additional data for them, the simulation model proved to be very useful to support a decision support system (DSS) to help decision makers in determining which of the events count as defects and need to be reworked. In our work we show that a DES model, when properly implemented, is as versatile as a Swiss knife and can make valuable contributions to more than one life cycle of manufacturing systems. (C) 2019, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.