Case Study: Boeing accelerates production planning analysis with Simio

Boeing cuts simulation modeling time by 10x with Simio

The customer, Boeing, faced the challenge of needing to answer production-related questions much earlier in their design cycle for new aerospace programs. The time and expertise required to create traditional analysis models prevented their routine use. Their goal was to develop a push-button capability to evaluate "produceability" metrics for candidate designs, such as required resource investments and supply chain robustness, using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) simulation tools including those from vendor Simio.

The solution implemented by Simio was a novel methodology that uses a Bridging Abstraction Model to automatically generate discrete-event simulation models from high-level system descriptions. This approach drastically reduced the time and expertise needed to formulate models. Boeing estimates that the Simio implementation yielded at least an order-of-magnitude reduction in the time required to answer routine production questions, enabling them to evaluate more scenarios and explore more of a production system’s design space early in the process.