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Casting Knowledge Re-use based Cost Advisor 

Defense Procurement and Maintenance agencies are faced with the growing challenge of maintaining aging Warfighter Systems and ensuring their mission readiness to meet various global commitments, while reducing procurement costs of parts for these systems. One of the key hindrances to ensuring such readiness has been parts obsolescence due to expiry of OEM support and dramatic reduction in the supplier base for such legacy parts due to these parts being non-standard and procurement volume being low. This has led to reliance on a handful of suppliers resulting in longer procurement cycle time and high procurement costs due to above-market prices for these parts.

During procurement, legacy parts are specified based on manufacturing processes available when those parts were produced. However newer alternative processes which may be able to produce those parts at lower costs, with lesser lead times are often overlooked at the part specification stage due to lack of awareness amongst defense personnel about advances in manufacturing technologies and associated cost impacts. Also part obsolescence and low procurement quantities have led to dependence on few suppliers which has made the defense agencies susceptible to inflated prices. Again efforts to control procurement costs by defense procurement personnel are therefore hindered due to a lack of knowledge on cost drivers and actual costs. Moreover, with the pending retirement of a large section of the workforce in the Defense Depots, a significant portion of the knowledge associated with these legacy parts will be lost. Given this scenario, the need is for a knowledge based “Process and Cost Advisor” that can help procurement and maintenance personnel not only identify alternative cost efficient processes but also enable them to understand cost drivers and “should cost” estimates in real time based on design criteria and process selected.

The proposed solution is to develop a prototype of a Casting Knowledge Re-Use based Cost Advisor specifically tailored for Castings in the defense aerospace sector in order to enable the Defense Procurement Agencies or maintenance depots achieve their objectives with respect to ensuring Warfighter readiness. The prototype will utilize technologies developed under the Intelligent Dynamic Engineering Advisory System (IDEAS) project funded by NSF Phase I & II grants. The prototype developed will also be relevant for use with current or future weapon systems which are being developed using 3D CAD systems. For parts created in 3D, the prototype will enable automatic extraction of design criteria and shape complexity to be used as inputs for the advisory system. For aging Warfighter systems where majority of part details are in 2D- or in scanned drawings, an interactive user interface will allow entry of important data needed for arriving at should costs.

Program Manager: Steven E. Hale, (734) 995-2195, stevenh@ncms.org