A method for comparing panel complexity to traditional material and production cost estimating techniques

• Ignoring producibility means ignoring a large cost driver.
• Grillages optimized for material costs are not optimized for producibility.
• Producibility drivers differ according to plate size.

In this paper a metric for assessing the producibility of a stiffened grillage structure in the early stage design is presented. This metric is comprised of seven separate producibility drivers that are dependent on the properties of the panel. The new producibility metric is compared with a traditional costing method in a two-objective genetic algorithm to show that there is a competition between the two methods, meaning that the new metric gives a designer additional information at the early design stage. The estimated costs versus producibility scores for several grillage sizes show that large gains in producibility can be made without large increases in estimated costs up until a critical point where a knee in the Pareto front occurs. Furthermore, it was found that the individual producibility elements are highly dependent on the size of the panel tested and the constraints the panel must meet. In general, producibility is a key factor to be considered in structural design and should be accounted for in any structural optimization.