Foil 14 ASOP and Multidisciplinary Analysis and Design(MAD)

• A set of manufacturing companies -- Rockwell International, Northrop Grumman, McDoinnell Douglas, General Electric and General Motors is studying the NII implications for a particular MAD system "Affordable Systems Optimization Process" (ASOP)
• Interesting parameters are that next major aircraft to be built could involve:
  • 6 major companies and 20,000 smaller supplier subcontractors
  • Number of engineers involved is about:
    • 50 at conceptual design
    • 200 at preliminary design
    • 2000 at final design
    • upto 10,000 in manufacturing and development
  • The design could involve upto 10,000 separate programs running in small linked clusters which vary from
    • Airflow simulation around plane to
    • expert system to plan location of inspection port to minimize maintenance costs
  • Critical is configuration management and system database

Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, Syracuse University, npac@npac.syr.edu