Features:

BOEING'S 'PHANTOM WORKS' WORKS
by J. William Bell, NCSA Access Magazine Editor

The Boeing Company is the world's leading aerospace company and a top U.S. exporter, dedicated to delivering the safest, most reliable, and most technologically advanced airplanes. The 767, for example, has flown more than seven and a half million flights and has carried two billion passengers since it entered service more than 20 years ago. It flies the Atlantic more frequently than all other jetliners combined.

But this sort of performance doesn't come easy.

Like all Boeing airplanes, the 767 contains millions of parts. These parts, and the many complex systems on board the jetliner, must work together seamlessly--and must be checked and rechecked to conform to the highest standards.

"Quality assurance fulfills a very important role at Boeing in that we provide thousands of inspections through the build sequence to ensure that we actually deliver the highest quality and safest airplanes in the world," says Jeff Kleman, quality director of Boeing's 98-acre manufacturing site in Everett, WA. "We take a lot of pride in our activity, and it's a critical aspect of our business."

Meeting a grand challenge

With safety and quality as their goals, Boeing's research and development unit, called "Phantom Works," teamed up with NCSA in 2003. Phantom Works employs 4,000 people dedicated to creating breakthroughs in performance, quality, and cost for the company. Together, over the course of a single year, Boeing and NCSA built a demonstration of a "distributed task manager" that highlights the benefits of network-centric planning and management in airplane inspection. Such software will help Boeing further ensure that their inspectors do the right job at the right place at the right time.

"Short development times are important because our whole business is predicated on time to market," according to Gary Fitzmire, vice president of engineering and information technology for Boeing Phantom Works.

In honor of this vital and rapid effort, NCSA's Private Sector Program presented its 2004 Industrial Grand Challenge Award to Boeing in April. The annual Grand Challenge Award honors breakthrough research completed by private sector partners while working with NCSA.

"NCSA provides a focal point for computer science, computational science, and information technologies. By working with the Private Sector Program partners, we're able to connect real world problems with the necessary infrastructure," says Rob Pennington, NCSA's interim director.

Bob Krieger, president of Boeing Phantom Works, concurs: "The real reason we partnered with NCSA is because they're very experienced in various software systems… Once you partner with somebody that's really expert, you have a lot of confidence and you can get the end objective, which is to have a good product."

Network-centric inspection solutions

Before a Boeing plane leaves the assembly plant, a legion of inspectors make more than 20,000 quality checks on the plane's various subsystems. These systems are tightly interrelated. The wing doesn't pass muster if an aileron is bad, and the instruments are only as good as the miles of electrical wire behind them. And these pieces are assembled over the course of months.

The software that coordinates this long-term focus on very small details is crucial to the quality of the finished product. Every test has to be tracked. Every flaw must be flagged and fixed. Currently, that means opening and closing jobs at a central terminal--in effect filling out paperwork on computers stationed about the assembly plant. Without an automated notification system, subsequent tasks, which can only be started upon the completion of the first, might sit for hours before another inspector knows that they are ready to be taken up.

"One of the keys to the project was job shadowing," explains Scott Lintelman, a project manager for Boeing Phantom Works. "Job shadowing is simply following the inspector around in the factory on his daily job and seeing what he does. It allowed us to gather requirements to ensure that our project was relevant to his needs."

Once the Boeing and NCSA team had a clear picture of what the inspectors did and how they did it, they developed a specialized database that tracked inspections and parceled out new jobs automatically. This "distributed task manager" is built on SAMCat, the Secure Active Metadata Catalog created by NCSA's integrated decisions technologies group.

SAMCat is a distributed messaging system based on XML. "We can use any application that can talk XML, which basically any application can. And they can send messages to SAMCat, and other applications that understand XML can take these messages out again," says NCSA's Rob Kooper, who leads SAMCat's development.

An initial test has been conducted, showing the potential of a complete, SAMCat-based, network-centric system. If implemented, inspectors will be able to move about with a hand-held computer or personal digital assistant connected to a central database via a wireless network. The PDA will constantly receive updates on what inspection tasks can be performed. The inspectors, meanwhile, will constantly update their progress on the PDA. The system will then determine which tasks can be performed as a result of that progress. New tasks can be delivered to inspectors in real-time according to their skills, certifications, or roles in the assembly plant. Problems, instead of being trapped in an inspector's notebook until the next time he makes a report, become common knowledge and can be addressed that much faster.

The catalyst for innovation

The benefits of a distributed task manager don't end with efficiency and cost reduction. A network-centric inspection system would give supervisors a look at the state of an airplane that is constantly updated. They'll know where they're at in the inspection process and where the snags are as they occur. Because of SAMCat's flexibility, existing quality assurance software could also be combined into a single system for use in the assembly plant.

"Network-centric solutions are central to the strategy of The Boeing Company, and by that I mean we need to get the right information at the right time to the right decision makers. That has a profound effect on the war fighters in the battle field. It has a profound effect on air traffic management. And it has a profound effect on our customers, because they arrive safely and faster at their destinations," says Fitzmire.

Already, the team is set to work on a proof-of-concept demonstration of a 767 inspection system. Boeing also sees network-centric principles moving into their global enterprise--everywhere from parts manufacturing to purchasing.

What the company learns today will have substantial influence on what they do tomorrow. In 2008, Boeing will roll out its newest airplane, the 7E7. The plane will be the most technologically advanced and efficient commercial jetliner ever built. Most of the plane will be made of composite materials, and it will use 20 percent less fuel than similar planes now on the market.

Such innovation requires not just technological improvements but also improvements in the ways jobs get done. The relationship between NCSA's Private Sector Program and Boeing brings both.

"Phantom Works is known as the catalyst of innovation for Boeing. What that means is we develop or, through collaborations, find technologies that we can bring into our product line," says Krieger. "The collaboration between Boeing and NCSA worked very well. NCSA brought new emerging technology, we brought the needs for our production floor. We both worked together to interface the two and ended up with a really great product in the end."

Access Online URL

http://access.ncsa.uiuc.edu/CoverStories/GCA04/