Aerospace product development value streams design and planning for sustainable performance improvement and optimal value under uncertainty

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The aerospace sector is important to Canada, with a contribution of close to twenty eight billion dollars to its gross domestic product, and more than one hundred and seventy thousands jobs in 2013. The industry also invests twenty percent of its activities in research and development, making it one of the most research and development intensive industries in the country. As Canada plans to enter the large jet market segment in 2015, the industry will be faced with an increasingly complex and uncertain product development context. Complex projects typically provide less benefit than anticipated, exceed their budgetary envelope, and are delivered late. Considering the very long product development cycles and payback periods found in aerospace, the Canadian industry benefits from significant governmental assistance. Enhancing the performance of the aerospace product development value streams becomes an urgent necessity, to ensure the continued competitiveness of the aerospace industry in Canada, to reduce the industry reliance on governmental assistance, and the risks associated with creating an inefficient industry. The objective of this research program is to contribute to the efforts towards the sustainable performance improvement and optimal value under uncertainty of the Canadian aerospace product development value streams. To achieve this objective requires taking into consideration multiple strategic and operational factors in the design, planning and control of the product development value streams. Such factors relate to the architecture of the product development value streams, methods of compliance to regulation; utilization and multitasking levels, product development task size and value, and uncertainty among others. The performance of aerospace product development value streams is affected by the lack of integrated decision making tools and processes incorporating such factors. The focus of this research program in the short term is on the discovery, modeling and quantification of factors influencing the performance of product development value streams, processes, projects, and products, the development of models relating factors levels to product development performance measures, the integration of factors into an adaptive product development stochastic modeling process to set desired factors levels over time for the design of the product development, and the development of advanced planning and control optimization models taking into consideration factors levels and uncertainty.  In the long term the concurrent use of multiple factors levels in both the design, and the planning and control of the product development value streams will result in creating innovative, robust and systematic optimization approaches supporting the sustainable enhancement of the aerospace industry product development performance.