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E2O Sim - Earth-to-Orbit Supply Chain Simulation, A Discrete Event Simulation for the NASA Exploration Architecture

July 16, 2007

Papers & Presentations ¦ The Project ¦ Contact

This project created an analytical capability for NASA's Vision for Space Exploration. This capability has been implemented in a team and a tool that can contribute to decision making and to the discovery of focus areas for the NASA Constellation program.

Why a Supply Chain Management perspective and NASA space transportation? why now?

...since space transportation is a developing market… since volume is low, as measured by the number of launches... since the technology maturity of products is low, and hence variance is high, contributing to a lack of responsiveness and a poor support posture... since human space flight is not a six sigma business...

...how does this commercial practice or perspective apply?

By treating information flows, such as sustaining engineering, requirements management, configuration control, scheduling, planning, administrative and financial, etc, as integral to material flows, such as flight & ground hardware processing, assembly, launch, return for refurbishment, reuse, disposition and servicing.

By taking advantage of existing well established models for representing and analyzing the relationships of material and information flows. The model of choice here is the Supply Chain Council's Supply Chain Operations Reference or "SCOR" model.

By taking advantage of capabilities that exist to create simulations for the analyst automatically. The sim is based on user inputs that require mostly subject matter expertise, not simulation programming skills. The analyst represents their specific supply chain using the relatively simple concepts of plan, source, make, deliver, return and a handful of others, such as inventory.

Papers & Presentations:

We define an Exploration Supply Chain as: “The integration of NASA centers, facilities, third party enterprises, orbital entities, space locations, and space carriers that network/partner together to plan, execute, and enable an Exploration mission that will deliver an Exploration product (crew, supplies, data, information, knowledge, physical samples) and to provide the after delivery support, services, and returns that may be requested by the customer.”

The Project:

As exploration operations expand further into space, NASA must enhance its understanding of the increasingly complex “supply chain” movement of materials, people, and information from sources (somewhere on Earth) to destinations (somewhere in space, e.g., LEO, GEO, Moon, Mars, etc.). Without the ability to understand, estimate, project, and affect decision making relevant to the supply chain, NASA will find it increasingly difficult to work as an informed collaborator with suppliers and contractors in the development of new systems. The cost of operating and sustaining the resulting systems will continue to be ill understood, grow, and exceed designated budgets. The path to optimizing operability and sustainability is by consideration of the entire supply chain.

Historically, processes and systems focused on the direct operations portion of the activity, neglecting the less visible enabling and supporting processes across the Supply Chain and logistics networks.

Supply Chain modeling & analysis capability is required to understand and control the impacts of the end-to-end Supply Chain design on responsiveness, life cycle costs, flexibility, reliability, asset management efficiency and safety.

The analytical tool now proceeding into analysis case definition as of July 2007 advances cutting edge supply chain modeling and simulation methods, adapting them to NASA unique requirements, and creating a capability to understand the entirety of system options that impact operability and sustainable life cycle costs. This project creates a first ever prototype of a 21st century supply chain modeling, simulation, and analysis to future ETO systems to grasp supply chain infrastructure issues early and credibly.

This task supports the Constellation program challenge to grasp supply chain infrastructure issues relating to technology both credibly and early in the decision making process.

  • Develops a supply chain modeling, simulation, & analysis tool focused on the supply chain and operations Earth-to-Orbit transportation systems, integrating after complete with other analytical capabilities that extend beyond Earth-to-Orbit (in-space, Lunar, Mars).

The relationship of LLEGO and the Interplanetary Supply Chain Management and Logistics Architecture project to the Earth-to-Orbit Suplly Chain Simulation for human spaceflight

The Software:

GUI of E2O SC Sim - Earth-to-Orbit Supply Chain Simulation for Orion Ares I.

Organization Units such as reviews for flight hardware readiness, are to the right, connecting to material flows via red lines.

Enabling organizational units are below, un-connected, sized to certain resource levels, and operating continuously to enable the more visible material flows. These enabling functions include engineering, sustaining, civil service, center management and operations, infrastructure, etc.

The more visible material flows, be they parts or larger well recognized assemblies of flight hardware elements, flow through the numerous facilities, shown in black.

The GUI transfers all information abut the system being represented to Arena software which automatically generates a Supply Chain Discrete Event Simulation Model based on pre-set understanding of the information being conveyed from the GUI. The Supply Chain Councils Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) Model is the standard being used to represent the NASA system.

Outputs of interest can then be picked from all DES statistics into a customized report.

The Team:

  • Productivity Apex, Inc.
    • Dr. Mansooreh Mollaghasemi, Chairman and CEO
    • Mike Calinan, PAI President. Project Role: Chief Logistician
    • Dr. Sam Fayez, Project Lead
    • Dayana Cope, Simulation Lead
    • Assem Kaylani, GUI Lead
    • Manuel Mora, Simulation Support

Milestones:

  • Phase 1: May 2005 to March 31, 200
  • Phase 2: August 10, 2006 - June 11, 2007
  • The initial Orion Ares I representation has been completed and analysis case definition is in work as of July 2007.

Contacts, Further Information, Distribution:

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Also see:

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Website Contact: Edgar Zapata, NASA Kennedy Space Center