AFRL-sponsored Program Saves Time, Money While Winning 2012 Defense Manufacturing Award

  • Published
  • By Heyward Burnette
  • Materials and Manufacturing
WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio --  The Customer/Supplier Interoperability (CSI) solution is making the exchange, transformation and sharing of technical information, most notably 3D CAD modeling and data, vastly easier and more cost effective. The CSI project developed and demonstrated these improved capabilities through the standardization and automation of transferring technical data, thereby shortening delivery schedules and improving the quality of data by eliminating errors found in non-automated transformations. The project identified potential annual savings of more than $20 million for large scale projects where, at times, 4,000 or more transfers of data and information can occur in a single month.

For these reasons, the CSI program--an initiative sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Office of the Secretary of Defense's (OSD) Defense-Wide Manufacturing Science & Technology, and led by the South Carolina Research Agency (SCRA)--received the 2012 Defense Manufacturing Achievement Award. The new capabilities offered by the CSI solution are helping to accelerate the defense industry's migration toward a streamlined and cost-efficient Model Based Enterprise (MBE).

Major programs are highly collaborative and involve a group of partners who must exchange technical data packages (TDPs) frequently throughout the program. However, the sharing, transferring and transformation of technical data among multiple collaborators has been fraught with costly errors and time-consuming manual data transformation necessary to suit the needs of varying software systems.

Beginning in September of 2010, the apparent benefits of the Customer/Supplier Interoperability program drew in the collaborative efforts of Lockheed Martin, Honeywell Aerospace, Rockwell Collins, and International TechneGroup Incorporated (ITI). The partnership identified key gaps that impacted the exchange of TDPs and then structured the desired capabilities to advance collaborative efforts on model-based technologies. Sponsored by AFRL and OSD, the CSI project demonstrated the automated exchange of design information on a portion of the F-35 enterprise which resulted in significant cost savings and reduced delivery schedules. This improvement of data through these new automated processes increased the quality and reliability of the product by reducing errors found in manual information transformation.

The CSI project enables improved collaboration across diverse software systems through the adherence to international standards and open data formats. ITI is currently transitioning CSI technologies through their existing commercial software packages, and the CSI team plans to expand the capabilities of the CSI solution in a number of areas, including the introduction of cloud-based services.