Complexity of systems and design
Systems developed by the OEMs increasingly combine electronics, hydraulics, mechanical components and sub-systems comprising thousands of ‘moving parts’. The greater the complexity of the system, the harder it is for an engineer to manually map the dependencies of failures between hierarchies and domains and therefore to identify potential risks. Complexity is a strong driver for OEMs to introduce technology such as MADE that is designed to reduce the complexity of the process for the engineer by ensuring that dependency modelling (or mapping) is achieved ‘automatically’ throughout the system rather than relying on the engineer.
Distributed design responsibility
Increasingly OEMs are devolving design responsibility to their design partners and lower tier suppliers while they focus on systems engineering and integration. However, a key issue for the OEMs is that they then use the design / failures data generated by their partners as the basis for analysing reliability and developing diagnostic capabilities. Therefore, there are strong drivers for the OEM to introduce technology that can increase standardisation into the design process in order to improve quality and analysis capabilities.
Divergence in Total Cost of Ownership
Significant variances develop in the support costs associated with complex systems, often because the costs of support are not considered appropriately during the design phase. MADE provides the potential to “Design for Support” instead of simply supporting the design based on its support of concurrent engineering practice to consider the ‘Supportability Influence’.
Performance Based Contracting (PBC)
Also referred to as Vendor Based Logistics (VBL) effectively transfers the financial risk of operating and maintaining equipment from the customer to the OEM. PBC means that OEMs are increasingly focused on technologies that can assist them to increase the reliability of their systems and therefore decrease the maintenance / logistics footprint required to support them (the major component of cost of ownership).
Implementation of MADE at any stage of the product lifecycle will generate a range of benefits:
1. Operational
- Optimize system availability (Readiness)
- Minimize downtime (Mission impact)
- Ensure ‘safe as practical’ operations
- Engineering decision support for supportability analysis
2. Cost
- Optimize cost of ownership
- Reduce the cost of engineering analyses (accelerate productivity)
- Reduce the schedule impact of engineering analyses
- Technical decision support for economic trade studies
3. Process
- Design / Acquire / Operate with support considerations
- Traceability of analysis across the product lifecycle
- Knowledge capture / management across the product lifecycle
- Model-based decision support with engineering analysis
Related Whitepapers
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Applications of AI and Decision-Making Methods in PHM Developing PHM capability for a system is a multi-staged process. This paper explores genetic algorithms, neural networks, fuzzy logic systems, AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process), and Boolean logic to synthesize and fuse complex decisions arising in PHM design. Tools for PHM analysis are typically introduced and utilized towards the end of a products design or potentially after design. The methods proposed....Download The Paper |
Competitive Technical Advantages
MADE is a model-based simulation solution with inherent technical and workflow advantages based on: