4.3 Use of the NII in the Manufacture of Complex Systems

We describe the application of the NII to the manufacture of aircraft, automobiles, and similar complex systems in rather more detail than the previous examples. This analysis stems from a NASA sponsored analysis of the NII requirements for a future concurrent engineering concept called ASOP (Affordable Systems Optimization Process). This involves an industry consortium MADIC (Multidisciplinary Analysis and Design Industrial Consortium) with a team from Rockwell, Northrop, Grumman Vought, McDonnell Douglas, General Electric, and General Motors. Interesting parameters specifying the scope of the design of the next major aircraft include:

• Construction will be led by a consortium of some six major companies and 20,000 smaller subcontractors.

• The number of engineers involved could be about:
  • 50 at conceptual design
  • 200 at preliminary design
  • 2,000 in final design
  • up to 10,000 for manufacturing and development

• ASOP involves multidisciplinary (multicomponent) optimizations (MDO) involving 10,000 separate programs that would be run in linked clusters (e.g., 10 programs at one time) for a set of specific design decision optimizations. These programs vary over a wide range from the full airflow simulation around a plane to a simple expert system to plan the best location of an inspection port to minimize maintenance life cycle costs.

  Such a manufacturing enterprise is an exciting and demanding challenge for the NII. First, note that the NII and its associated services is effectively essential for this application because the expertise and infrastructure needed for the design and manufacture of new aircraft is spread geographically through the country and perhaps globally. This expertise needs to be linked (by NII) to perform collaborative and coordinated design and simulation. If the NII did not exist, equivalent capabilities would need to be supplied by the involved companies, and indeed this has happened, using private lines as infrastructure, on some earlier projects.

  What are some key NII services needed by ASOP?

• Compared to the previous NII application's discussed in Section 4.2, manufacturing requires a close and integrated coupling of the very many people and computers involved. We are linking them in the design and manufacture of a very precise entity as opposed to the looser coupling required by, say, collaborative scientific research. Remote surgery in Section 4.2(a) is an example of another such close integration requirement for the NII.

• Metacomputing and distributed database support will have strong requirements to support the large number of linked programs connected to a logically central, but physically distributed design database.

• Workflow support must include configuration management and strong coordination with structured updates of the design database.

• Standards and security will be needed to link people and software from different organizations. In particular, efficient security for large files will be needed.

• Clearly NII and novel optimization techniques must present a good evolutionary path to allows re-use and incremental upgrading of existing software and people infrastructure. This implies good ``wrapper'' technology to support use of existing software modules with new interfaces.

• Finally, the NII collaborative services will be stressed by the close coordination of the large number of engineers needed in design process.

  We can use this application to briefly discuss the use of parallel computing in industrial simulations [32], [27], and [33]. This has not been as successful as many people hoped. For ASOP, we can see some aspects of the problem.

• Parallel processing can certainly be of value in simulations for propulsion, aerodynamic and probably other areas. However, these are a small fraction of the tasks (remember we mentioned 10,000 programs in ASOP) needed to design a new aircraft. Thus, we find a variant of Amdahl's law---parallel processing can effectively reduce needed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation time. However, if this is only a fraction of x ( perhaps) of total endeavor, we have a speedup of at best !

• As the aerospace industry adjusts to reduced DoD spending, and the construction of fewer military aircraft, it is hard for the industry to invest in new technologies with an unclear return on investment.

Thus, we see parallel processing on its own, insufficient to develop approaches to manufacturing. Rather, we need the integration of high speed networks and computers envisaged by the NII. Further, we require several basic NII services---security, metacomputing, collaboration, wrappers and agents, workflow with configuration management---to be well developed. Thus, we can expect the NII and, in particular, parallel processing to have a profound compact on manufacturing that will be great value to the National Enterprise. However, this is not an easy or short task, and we can expect significant government investment to be needed in basic precompetitive technologies and services. Industry is not likely to be able to make the necessary long term investments on its own. Correspondingly parallel computing will be used in a major fashion in manufacturing, but not in the near future, and not without continued thoughtful investment by industry, government, and academia.