WITNESS helps Airbus perfect plans for massive A380 wing production facility

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Lanner Group, Inc.
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Phone: 713.532.8008
Email: info@lanner.com
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Airbus
Aerospace
Facility Layout Optimization
Multi-Million $ Savings
CASE STUDY
WITNESS helps Airbus perfect plans for
massive A380 wing production facility
Airbus relied on WITNESS simulation software from the Lanner Group to help
optimize the production process and facility layout for its new A380 wing
production complex in Broughton, UK. The new building, known as the west
factory is one of a number of facilities that Airbus is constructing across Europe
to support production of the A380 and other manufacturing activities. The A380
is a flagship aircraft that Airbus president and CEO Noël Forgeard deems as
critical to the company. “This aircraft is extremely important both for Airbus’
continuing success and for the economic benefits it brings to the United
Kingdom,” he told guests at the official unveiling of the Broughton site in July of
2003.
Airbus is a multi-national company which
began life as a consortium in the 1960’s.
The expansion at the Broughton site is
just one of several construction projects
supporting A380 production all across
Europe. Taken together, the undertaking
is currently one of the world’s largest civil
engineering programs. The Broughton
factory manufactures wings for all of
Airbus’ aircraft, but none of these are as
large as the wings they’re producing for
the A380. At nearly 140 feet long (43m),
the wings are the largest ever designed
and built for a commercial aircraft. This
isn’t surprising, considering that the
A380 is itself the largest passenger
aircraft ever built, capable of handling
555 passengers—much more than the
375 passengers that Airbus’s next largest
aircraft holds. The sheer size of the A380
wings requires an equally massive facility
to house its production. The West factory
site covers an area of more than 90,000
square yards
Airbus was considering
an $8 million crane
system to transfer work
around its huge facility.
WITNESS showed them
how a $6 million
system could do the
job. Says Andy
Marshall: “WITNESS
served its purpose with
that single decision.”
www.lanner.com
Airbus
Aerospace
Facility Layout Optimization
Multi-Million $ Savings
CASE STUDY
(83,500 sq m), larger than a dozen football fields
(12 soccer pitches). Building work began at the
facility in August 2001 and more than 10,000 tons
of steel and 80,000 cubic yards (75,000 cm) of
concrete have been used in its construction.
WITNESS brings Airbus big benefits
With so much riding on the efficient operation of the
Broughton facility, it’s not surprising that Airbus
turned to WITNESS simulation to ensure that the
wing production process would be as lean as
possible. What is surprising is how important a role
they’ve given WITNESS in guiding their decision
making and how ambitiously they’ve pushed the
software into unconventional applications.
“Our facility and the production process that it
houses are massive and complex, and our WITNESS
model has effectively captured the scope of the
operation,” says Andy Marshall, the engineer
responsible for building the simulation. “The model
provides a good overall view of factory life at the
same time that it gives us a perspective on the
more detailed phases of our process. In this
respect, it has proven beneficial to both high-level
management and the dozens of small engineering
teams focused on specific areas of the operation.”
How beneficial? WITNESS helped save Airbus $1.8
million with one upper management decision alone.
Airbus was considering an $8 million crane system
to transfer work around the huge facility. WITNESS
showed them how a $6.2 million system could do
the job. Says Marshall: “WITNESS served its
purpose with that single decision.”
Of course, there have been hundreds of smaller
decisions at the engineering team level that have
also proven the value of simulation. In one
instance, WITNESS showed Airbus engineers how
they could use four $750,000 laser tracking units as
measuring devices, instead of the ten they originally
thought they would need. With all the different
operations that would be using the laser tracking
units, there were periods where airbus work could
keep ten machines busy. But there were other
times where none of them would be in use. “We
explored different workflow scenarios in WITNESS
and came up with a way to handle the workload by
using only four tracking units,” Marshall explains.
“At a $750,000 apiece, that’s a significant saving.”
Getting started with the simulation project
Marshall began developing the WITNESS model of
the A380 wing production process in the summer of
2001, before Airbus broke ground on the
construction of the facility. The purpose of using
simulation was to conduct preproduction analysis
not only on the process flow of the A380 wings but
also on the physical layout of the plant.
Manufacturing companies typically rely on WITNESS
to analyze process flow; the software is used less
often for facility layout—and it’s rare for companies
to rely on WITNESS, like Airbus does, to drive firstdraft
conceptual design of a plant.
Then again, Airbus is one of the more advanced
WITNESS users. Jim Cruise, the veteran simulation
specialist at Airbus, has been using WITNESS for
fifteen years. At the time that the A380 modeling
project came up, Cruise was working on simulations
for four different production lines. Marshall was
brought on board to have a simulation modeler
focused exclusively on the west factory facility.
Amazingly, given how complex and extensive the
model needed to be, it was the first simulation
model Marshall ever built. Airbus took him off the
shop floor and Jim Cruise got him up to speed on
WITNESS with Lanner’s training assistance.
In the project’s early days, there were several
teams of experts focused on various areas of
Since A380 wings are manufactured with their leading
edge pointing up, a six-story building is required to
house the structural wing assembly area.
www.lanner.com
Airbus
Aerospace
Facility Layout Optimization
Multi-Million $ Savings
CASE STUDY
production within the facility. The first order of
business was to link these teams together in a
single process flow model so that management
could gain a better understanding of whether the
overall process would meet the facility’s production
goal of four pairs of A380 wings per month. One of
the challenges Marshall faced then—and continues
to face today—is building a model that reflects the
immediate production activity while accommodating
future demands. “At the moment, we’re at low-rate
production, moving A380 wings between production
stages every two or three months,” Marshall
explains. “Certain issues only manifest themselves
at full production, when we’re moving wings around
our facility nearly every day. My challenge is to
build a model that can look ten years down the
road. And the challenge for the engineering teams
is to think about the impact their decisions have on
the future of the facility.”
Detailing the A380 wing production process
From the initial process flow model that was
developed in 2001, Marshall has added more and
more detail to the simulation, including information
on both the ground-based production activities and
the crane system that transports parts between the
various phases of the operation.
The A380 wing production line is broken down into
four key areas—skin panel assembly, structural
wing assembly, wing equipping and paint. When the
facility receives a wing skin, which is the wing’s
outer surface, it is a flexible piece of aluminum
about 100 feet in length. Wing “stringers,” or
stiffening beams, are then placed inside the surface
of the skins and riveted and bolted together. Four
low-voltage electromagnetic riveting (LVER)
machines are used to rivet and bolt about 60,000
fasteners to each of the 12 panels that make up a
wing. WITNESS has provided advanced forecasts for
further purchases of these huge riveting machines.
After the skin panels are assembled, the wings are
loaded into four-story high jigs, along with other
wing parts—the leading and trailing edges, ribs and
spars—for structural wing assembly. This is the
most time-consuming stage in the process; it takes
28 days to produce a structurally sound wing “box.”
Because of this low turnover and the high cost of
automation, the stage continues to be a manual
work area, so process optimization at this point is
largely a labor resource issue. But that’s not the
only challenge the stage presents. Since the wing is
manufactured with its leading edge pointing up, a
six-story building is required to house the structural
wing assembly area. “This is more the scale of
shipbuilding than car making,” Marshall points out.
“Despite that, we’ve used many of the methods that
the car industry has pioneered, such as lean
manufacturing, to accelerate our cycle times.”
Once the wing is transformed into a structurally
sound box, it goes to the wing equipping stage,
where all the hydraulics, pneumatics, fuel systems
and wiring are added, and finally to the painting
stage. One of the big challenges in transporting the
wing to the building that houses these two stages
involves taking the wing out of its vertical aspect in
the assembly jig and turning it horizontally. This
activity has had a significant impact not only on the
design of the facility, but also on the design of the
process. Since the wing must move from a six-story
building to a lower building, a different crane
system needs to be used and space has to be
allocated for laying the wing down on a floating,
hovercraft-like platform.
Low-voltage electromagnetic riveting machines are
used to rivet and bolt about 60,000 fasteners to each
of the 12 panels that make up a wing. WITNESS has
predicted that 10 of these huge riveting machines
may be required at rate 4 production.
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www.lanner.com
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CASE STUDY
Finding solutions before problems arise
Marshall’s initial WITNESS model focused
exclusively on defining the ground-based production
activities. This made for a reasonably complex
model involving 38 machines, 10 sets of labor and
16 buffer areas. However, there was a whole other
dimension of the production process that was
missing: the elaborate crane system that would
transport parts around the factory. Airbus spent
several months working with a crane manufacturer
to explore options for a system that the building
could physically handle without pulling the roof
down. An $8 million crane system was initially
considered, but WITNESS showed Airbus that a
$6.2 million system could do the job.
Once Marshall overlaid the crane system onto the
ground-based production process, the WITNESS
model became considerably more complicated—and
a number of issues soon became apparent. After
the wing moves out of the structural assembly
stage in the six-story building and is turned
horizontally into its flying aspect, it goes onto a
separate crane system in the smaller building that
houses the wing equipping and paint stages. Once
in the low-level building it must then be transported
over active work areas. In simulating this aspect of
the process, Marshall realized that anyone working
on the shop floor would have to clear out from
under the wing as it was transported into the
equipping area as a safety precaution.
Marshall modified the model so that, depending on
where the wing was being delivered, it would
predict how many people needed to move out of the
way, and therefore how much time the process
would take. “It’s an issue that doesn’t have much
impact right now,” Marshall says. “But five years
from now, when we’re moving wings into the
equipping stage more frequently, all time has to be
accounted for. We wouldn’t have been able to do
this without WITNESS.”
Another issue WITNESS highlighted was a potential
bottleneck with the crane system. As production
increases in the coming years, more manufacturing
activities will need to use the independent crane
system in the wing equipping stage. WITNESS has
shown that the production cycle will need to be
extended by about eight hours due to the restricted
number of cranes available in this area. “We’ve
gone back to the production planning people and
asked them to move any operations that involve a
crane off the critical path so that we don’t extend
the production cycle,” Marshall says. “It’s a lot
easier to address these issues now when they’re
just concerns, than later when they become
pressing problems.”
Perfecting the future…
The new west factory is now complete. The plan is
to have the first set of wings completed in spring
2004 and shipped to France for final assembly and
first flight in 2005.
Even though Airbus is moving out of the
preproduction phase of the process, however,
demands for Marshall’s modeling services haven’t
eased up. “Our project has grown from a mere eight
people on site to about 250 engineers,” he says,
“and each one of those has an input. So keeping up
with what’s going on within that factory
environment keeps me busy.”
A big part of the reason that Marshall remains in
such high demand is that the model serves the
needs of both upper management and the
engineering teams. “Detailed models can be created
inside the main structure of the same model,”
Marshall explains. “We can burrow down into
specific areas of the massive model and give
individual engineers detailed answers to their
questions, such as ‘You need to go out and buy
exactly ten of these small hand tools.’ We can also
go to upper management with the same model and
demonstrate to them that they’re spending too
much money on a certain area or they’ve built
things in the wrong place, et cetera.”
The model is so comprehensive, in fact, that
Marshall is sometimes distracted with less than
mission-critical inquiries. “I have at one stage been
asked whether I could evaluate movements to
restrooms,” Marshall admits, laughing. “That’s the
only problem with having a model that seems to
have the answer for everything.”

lizhiming0707

thanks a lot