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This research develops a discrete event simulation to investigate factors that affect key Air Force (AF) metrics for gauging the health of the AF spares supply chain and the impact on maintaining the mission capability of individual weapon systems. We focus on the unscheduled maintenance actions at a single air base for a single weapon system -the B-1 Bomber. A notional fleet of 16 aircraft at a single air base is modeled based on historical supply and maintenance data. To identify and quantify the effects of various factors, an experimental design is used for analyzing the output of our high-level discrete event simulation. This exploration shows we successfully capture several factors that significantly impact the key metrics used for the B-1 and have the potential to significantly increase mission capability for this weapon system.

Joint Staff J7, Suffolk, VAThis research addresses the optimization of an engineered flapping micro air vehicle wing. The engineered wing was developed using a finite element model of a Manduca Sexta forewing. A full factorial design was used to determine a representative model of the natural system. From this baseline wing, a constrained response surface was coupled with a Latin hypercube of the design space. Results from this provide an initial vector for a mesh adaptive direct search algorithm. Further investigation of the design space was carried out using a blind search approach. Initial results demonstrate significant reduction in mass, while maintaining features which are representative of the biological wing. A test article based on the optimized design will be fabricated and tested.