Simulation for Aerospace & Defence
Low Volume, Long Horizon, Constrained by Resources
Aerospace and defence production is the opposite of a bottling line: units are few, cycles are long, and the thing in short supply is rarely machine capacity. It is fixtures, bays, cranes, transport, qualified people. Throughput is decided by how those resources are shared over months and years — which is a scheduling and contention problem, not a rate problem.
Who has used it
Boeing · Lockheed Martin · Raytheon · NASA · Electric Boat · SAIC · Los Alamos National Laboratory · Sandia National Laboratories · Westinghouse Savannah River · United States Marine Corps
How many fixtures buy how many rockets?
Delta IV launch vehicles are shipped to Cape Canaveral in parts and assembled near the launch site. Assembly needs specialised fixtures, each one expensive and each one occupied for a long time by a single vehicle. Buy too few and vehicles queue for a fixture; buy too many and capital sits idle between launches.
Boeing used a model to assess exactly that tradeoff — the number of specialised assembly fixtures against the throughput of assembled rockets.
Structurally this is the buffer question in different clothing. A fixture is a resource that decouples one stage from the next, its cost is capital, and the right number depends on variability rather than on averages. The arithmetic that sizes a surge tank in a chemical plant sizes an assembly fixture at a launch site.
The method is cited in the field
In 2010, Steven E. Saylor and James K. Dailey of Boeing Research & Technology presented BALANCE — the Advanced Logistics Analysis Capabilities Environment — at the Winter Simulation Conference. It builds on the non-item-based approach, citing Phelps, Parsons and Siprelle (2002).
That is a different kind of evidence from a testimonial. A major aerospace research organisation built its own logistics analysis capability on this modelling approach and said so at the field’s flagship conference.
Long horizons and shared resources
Programmes measured in decades
Transport and storage resource planning for Department of Energy transuranic waste was assessed over a 35-year horizon. At that timescale the question stops being "can we do it" and becomes "what do we need, when, and what happens if it arrives late" — which only a model that runs a whole programme quickly can answer across scenarios.
Facility maintenance as a bid input
Resource requirements for long-term facility maintenance were modelled to support contract proposals: how much crew, plant and float a multi-year service commitment actually needs, given failures that arrive unpredictably.
Contention between programmes
Bays, cranes, clean rooms and qualified technicians are shared across programmes that are planned independently. A schedule that works for each programme alone can be infeasible for all of them together, and that only shows up when they are simulated on the same resources.
Deployment
Everything runs on the desktop. No outbound data flow, no cloud dependency, air-gap compatible — your process data never leaves your network. In this sector that is usually the first question rather than the last.
The same mechanisms, documented on other lines
How big should a buffer be?
How much decoupling capacity is worth buying, and why the answer depends on variability rather than on average rates. The fixture-count question in its general form.
Read the guide → Capital vs UtilisationThe bagging lines were tied to the reactors
How many lines to buy, traded against running the existing ones harder — answered on the time split rather than on nameplate capacity.
Read the case study →Related: Chemicals, oil & gas · Pharma & life sciences · All case studies