Project Participants: Newport News Shipbuilding

Project Start: August 2014

Newport News Shipbuilding is creating the ability to quickly and easily analyze material impact on build strategy decisions.  Naval ship construction is an immensely complex logistical activity involving large quantities of highly specialized material, equipment and personnel. All material that ultimately resides in a CVN must be pulled from inventory, staged within a limited footprint and moved to the mechanic’s work site along predetermined material paths. Material availability in the right job site at the right time is a key element in NNS’s drive to lower CVN construction costs.

The project’s objective is to deliver a tool that will allow the material logistic controllers to manage the adjacent lay down areas in an optimal manner.  The lay down areas next to the work areas need to be synchronized with the type of work currently underway with respect to required square footage and location.  This project will provide an adaptive simulation tool capable of adjusting the material lay down layout and delivery path to the existing build strategies.

NNS is executing this 24-month project over two phases. Phase 1 addresses data and information collection and will quantitatively define the problems.  Phase 2 involves the development of the simulation tool.  The initiative will be led by the Material Distribution Department (O53) supported by planning personnel representing all trades involved in both dry dock construction (CVN 79) and Pier 3 outfitting operations (CVN78).  The CVN Construction Material Logistical Planning Tool will illustrate by reports how a specific build (construction or outfitting) strategy will impact material resources, thus allowing CVN management to determine the optimum plan chosen from several potential alternative plans each having been analyzed using the simulation tool.

The NNS team will develop a prototype simulation based material logistics planning tool employing Discrete Event Simulation techniques to create a library based re-usable application to optimize material logistic scenarios and improve the efficiency of CVN construction.  The simulation tool will permit Ship Construction Production Control to quickly link a proposed build strategy (probably developed that day because of an unforeseen delay) to those material delivery logistics associated with the involved CVN tasks.

This technology, once implemented, could reduce lost trade time by 33,000 hours and reduce CVN acquisition costs by an estimated $1.28M per CVN Hull.

Project Related Reports & Documents

CNST Awards Synchronizing Material Logistics

Success Story