The future for the aerospace and defense (A&D) industry has never been brighter as we enter 2024. Soon people will be traveling across cities in urban air mobility vehicles, sustainable aircraft made with more efficient airframes and propulsion systems will lessen the amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere, and in space, a new commercial tourism industry will rise, and humans will set foot on Mars for the first time. There are so many things to be excited about in aerospace right now.
Yet there’s one major issue, the industry has far more money being invested than it has people employed to spend it. For the first time in more than 30 years, every sector in A&D – from commercial and defense to space – is experiencing significant growth simultaneously, defying the traditional yin and yang between sectors’ growth that’s dominated the industry in the past. However, the growing number of people leaving the industry threatens that growth.
According to a PwC/AIA workforce study, more than “29% of the industry’s workforce is over the age of 55, creating waves of retirement impact lasting 10-to-20 years into the future. These retirements will create a projected gap of 3.5 million workers by 2026, increasing the pressure to hire in an already competitive marketplace.” EY-Parthenon predicts by 2030, one of every five A&D engineering jobs will be unfilled.
The A&D industry is at an inflection point. For the industry to continue to thrive and grow, this workforce shortage must be addressed. Many in industry are focusing their attention on recruiting more students into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and other programs with the hope of attracting and retaining skilled workers. These are important, but education and worker retention programs in isolation won’t solve the problem. The key to solving the A&D workforce issue is digital transformation and adopting new methods to design, build, and support products multiplying the impact of existing workers.
The journey
Digital transformation isn’t a new idea. The A&D industry has been implementing many forms of digital transformation for the past two decades, gaining an early lead compared to other industries. However, this transformation has neither been fast enough nor gone far enough to solve workforce issues.
Digital transformation is a journey, not a destination. Siemens has developed a five-step framework of digital transformation maturity to guide companies as they digitalize their engineering processes. Companies can use this framework to evaluate their progress toward maturity and determine the next step in their digital journeys. Digital transformation maturity will help A&D companies transition from a document-based company to a fully digitalized and optimized closed-loop enterprise, overcoming their workforce issues in the process.
The five steps of this framework are:
1. Configuration is the initial transition from document-based to model-based workflows. This involves managing the creation, changing, and archiving of all information related to a product, storing data in a safe place so it can be found and reused at any point in the product life cycle – this is also known as product data management (PDM).
2. Connection is the next stage, bridging together multi-domain product data throughout the product life cycle. This enables enhanced traceability from requirements to design, verification/certification, manufacturing, support, and finally disposal. Connection also involves creating common data models enabling the flow of product data across the various engineering domains, tools, and databases, enabling an authoritative source of truth for a product. Many A&D companies see this stage as the end of their digital transformation journey, but stopping here delivers only a limited return on investment. To get the most from digital transformation maturity, companies must go further.
3. Automation is at the heart of digital transformation, freeing humans from costly, tedious tasks to focus on the work that really matters. It can be divided into two phases, the first automating the mundane (things humans don’t want to do), and then automating the complex (things we thought only humans could do). Automation leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to do these things, but the goal isn’t to replace engineers. Rather, the goal is to make engineers’ working environment easier and allow them to dedicate their efforts to the tasks most important to the engineering process, creating an innovative way of aerospace engineering that benefits employees and attracts new hires.
4. Generative design is a multi-domain process that leverages AI/ML to automatically create one-to-many design alternatives. The process begins with engineers creating a series of prompts describing desired parameters and ending with auto-generated detailed design artifacts. It’ll be some time before generative design can be performed at the scale of an entire aircraft, but early inroads have already been made to generate individual parts and systems. Additionally, once a design can be auto-generated, then many design alternatives can also be auto-generated.
5. Closed-loop optimization automatically evaluates the design alternatives against key performance indicators, adjusts the design goals, and relaunches the generative design process to create an improved design. This process is repeated by testing realistic virtual prototypes (digital twins) until the desired product is optimized at the highest level, rather than having each individual system sub-optimized in isolation. This can result in hundreds or even thousands of iterations, the best of which are presented to engineers for final validation. Closed-loop optimization automatically removes mistakes from flawed design iterations and reduces the need to build or validate physical prototypes.
A digital journey to a brighter future
A&D companies continue to look for more workers to design and build their products, but they’ll never find all the workers they need. Successful companies must find ways to multiply the impact of the workers they have, and digital transformation is the key to that success.
It’s crucial for companies to know where they stand in their digital transformation journey. Are they already well along the path or are they just beginning? The five steps of digital transformation maturity help companies understand where they are and provide guidance for taking the next steps.
The key is not reaching the end. The key is taking the next step. Current software tools allow us to connect and configure data like never before, and as AI technology continues to improve, companies can automate more complex processes, building the foundation for generative design and closed-loop optimization down the line. By following these steps, the A&D industry can successfully navigate the journey toward realizing the bright future of aerospace we know can be achieved.
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