Development of new Advanced Manufacturing Technology (AMT) for the aerospace industry is critical to
enhance the manufacture and assembly of aerospace products. These novel AMTs require high development
cost, specialist resource capabilities, have long development periods, high technological risks and lengthy
payback durations. This forms an industry reluctance to fund the initial AMT development stages, impacting on
their success within an ever increasingly competitive environment.
Selection of suitable AMTs for development is typically performed by managers who make little reference to
estimating the non-recurring development effort in resources and hardware cost. In addition, the performance at
the conceptual stage is predicted using expert opinion, consisting of subjective and inaccurate outputs. AMTs
selected are then submerged into development research and heavily invested in, with incorrect selections having
a detrimental impact on the business.
A detailed study of the UK aerospace manufacturing industry corroborated these findings and revealed a
requirement for a new process map to resolve the problem of managing AMT developments at the conceptual
stages. This process map defined the final research protocol, forming the requirement for a Cost-Benefit
Forecasting Framework. The framework improves the decision making process to select the most suitable
AMTs for development, from concept to full scale demonstration. Cost is the first element and is capable of
estimating the AMT development effort in person-hours and cost of hardware using two parametric cost models.
Benefit is the second element and forecasts the AMT tangible and intangible performance. The framework plots
these quantified cost-benefit parameters and is capable of presenting development value advice for a diverse
range of AMTs with varied applications. A detailed case study is presented evaluating a total of 23 novel
aerospace AMTs verifying the capability and high accuracy of the framework within a large aerospace
manufacturing organisation. Further validation is provided by quantifying the responses from 10 AMT
development experts, after utilising the methodology within an industrial setting. The results show that
quantifying the cost-benefit parameters provides manufacturing research and technology with the ability to
select AMTs that provide the best value to a business.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:CRANFIELD1/oai:dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk:1826/9247 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Jones, Mark Benjamin |
| Contributors | Webb, Phil, Baguley, Paul |
| Publisher | Cranfield University |
| Source Sets | CRANFIELD1 |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or dissertation, Doctoral, PhD |
| Rights | © Cranfield University 2014. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of the copyright owner. |
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