Title: Introducing a Digital Product Model Based Aircraft Carrier to a Traditional Drawing-Based Ship Maintenance and Modernization Community
Author(s): Frances Glenn, Huntington Ingalls Industries - Newport News Shipbuilding
Abstract:
This presentation will discuss the challenges faced by the aircraft carrier maintenance and modernization community to successfully support the Product Modeled CVN 78 Class aircraft carrier within a Model Based Enterprise (MBE) environment. The shipbuilding industry is in the process of evolving from a “paper” centric (2D hardcopy drawing) environment to a data centric (3D product model) digital environment (i.e., replacing 2D drawings with comprehensively annotated 3D computer generated models). CVN 78 is the first of a new class of aircraft carrier designed, built and documented in a digital, data-centric, MBE environment intended to also apply to the ships life cycle support processes. The cost effective extension of the benefits of the MBE environment from ship construction to maintenance, modernization, and lifecycle support, depends on the ability of the maintenance and modernization community to understand and adopt the MBE environment to change how information is collected and how planning and execution products are developed. Establishing a MBE environment within the maintenance and modernization community has the potential to positively change all aspects of the ships life cycle management including; ship alteration design, collaboration with suppliers, ship arrangement and configuration management, integration between providers, manufacturing and assembly, as well as enabling the standardization of products across organizations, reuse of design, planning and execution products, maintenance and repair flexibility, and capitalization of design for maintenance attributes of the class.
This paper will discuss the MBE maturity levels and discuss the planning needed to increase the MBE maturity levels and capabilities of the carrier maintenance and modernization community.