The aerospace and defense sectors of the manufacturing industry represent the true cutting edge of technological development and innovation and have a direct impact on national security.
The need for a venue to discuss and examine current and future technologies to ensure secure production and the supply chain for these sectors is what led SME to establish AeroDef Manufacturing as an event in 2011, and why the event is continuing this year featuring a colocation with RAPID + TCT, SAE International’s World Congress Experience (WCX) and America Makes’ Spring Technical Review and Exchange (TRX) in Detroit.
For George (Nick) Bullen, retired Northop Grumman chief engineer, advanced manufacturing, the value that AeroDef Manufacturing provides to discuss these issues is invaluable.
“I’m a big believer in discovery,” Bullen said. “I walk the floor to see what I don’t know. I go to listen to what I don’t know, as opposed to learning more about what I do know.
“To me, AeroDef [Manufacturing] offers an excellent opportunity to answer questions, where I’ll be walking down an aisle and say, ‘whoa, I had a problem, that might be a solution.’”
Bullen, a member of the AeroDef Manufacturing Strategic Advisory Committee and SME Fellow, has been participating in the event since its founding.
“I think it covers the technologies that are extant within our industry, defense and manufacturing. I think it covers all the viewpoints, whether you want to go in-depth at the conference sessions, or whether you just want to walk around the show floor and see the technology, or if you want to go to The Deck and listen to perspectives from people who are leaders in our industry. I think it provides all those things,” Bullen said.
Among the topics Bullen wants to see and hear more about at AeroDef Manufacturing this year is the growth of artificial intelligence in the manufacturing area of the aerospace and defense industry, an advancement Bullen has been following and promoting for some time now.
“We produce some of the most complex products devised by human beings, produced by both machines and human beings. Our assembly lines do not start up on day one. They evolve to maturity over years,” Bullen said. “I think opportunity begins to evolve when we look at digital tools that can improve our full rate assembly lines with minimum disruptions. How do you future-proof your factory in order to do that? Our machines and our controllers produce a lot of data and output a lot of data. Identifying the right data to the machine makers and saying, ‘I need to understand this data. You need to isolate and provide this data.’”
By leveraging the data produced by smart equipment and applying machine learning and artificial intelligence, Bullen said, manufacturers can identify the source of common defects and apply solutions without disrupting the overall process.
“In working on the F-35 program, we found that if you have an independent event where we had a defect, we fixed that defect because in the pressure and the rush producing that airplane, we don’t take the time to go back and say, ‘did that defect happen before?’,” Bullen said. “What we found was 80 percent of the defects that were within our domain were the same defects, the same place, the same cause over and over. AI and structured knowledge-based, object-oriented expert systems evaluated that and said you can get rid of 80 percent of your defects because they’re recurring, so let’s evaluate those and fix them, and we did.”
Bullen said the next frontier for AI in manufacturing is collecting and evaluating biometrics to see how factories can optimize labor to reduce defects, improve performance and anticipate problems before they arise.
“Let’s say you want to make a smart factory, so you get all these things that identify your data for mining and machine learning; you have your dashboards set up, everything, you can predict downtime, so you can go and do all these magic things to improve and smooth machine performance, and then you hand it to a human,” Bullen said. “...The next element that we’re looking at for mining is biometrics. What’s going on with that person that I can predict? ...Not internal data ...whether or not they’re fatigued, so we can move them to another task.”
In addition to internal systems, Bullen said the increasing use of AI to assess and predict issues with supply chains is also an area where manufacturers can find opportunities.
“You have components coming from suppliers into your assembly lines, and any hiccup in the supply chain sends trauma all the way through the process,” Bullen said. “If someone can’t deliver parts on time, it sends shock waves through the manufacturing process because that component may be located somewhere that restricts continuance of the operation causing the assembly line to stall.”
Bullen said attending AeroDef Manufacturing is an excellent way to see systems that can help achieve these goals as well as smaller solutions to problems.
“Sometimes it isn’t the big technologies that can make a huge difference, sometimes the simplest things can make a big difference in the life of those mechanics out on the line doing the work.”
AeroDef Manufacturing will take place April 8-10, 2025, at Detroit’s Huntington Place. Registration is open at aerodefevent.com.