Systems Engineering Framework for Integrated Product and Industrial Design Including Trade Study Optimization

Many aerospace and defense system affordability issues can often be traced back to early systems engineering and supply chain decisions that placed a premium on size, weight, functionality, and business “price to win” targets only to find that recurring production cost targets could not be met due to inadvertently “designed-in” manufacturing inefficiencies. To address this problem, there is a significant need for industrial engineering and supply chain analyses to be integrated into early systems engineering activities to ensure that systems are optimally designed to meet both internal “producer” and external “user” stakeholder requirements. This paper will describe a novel approach for integrating manufacturing and supply chain considerations into the systems engineering process through the development of an industrial V-model which mirrors the conventional product V-model. The benefits of adopting this integrated product-industrial system design framework is that it provides a structured hierarchical concurrent engineering approach to balance conflicting performance and producibility requirements that impact system affordability at each stage in the system design and development process.