Decarbonising aviation by 2050 will be a huge challenge. In response the sector is adopting green supply chain management (GSCM) approaches which involves purchasing environmentally responsible materials/parts, incorporating environmental criteria into design, and reducing resource/energy/material consumption to minimise pollution/waste. A key implementation barrier is the lack of understanding regarding the carbon weight of manufactured parts.
This project seeks to develop Carbon Calculator software that will for the first time, enable manufacturers to accurately calculate the carbon footprint of each individual engineered component produced.
Agile Group System & Services (Lead) is an industry leader in developing Material Requirements Planning (MRP)-software for the manufacturing and engineering sectors with extensive experience within advanced manufacturing, particularly for Aerospace (blue chip organisations and SMEs). Warren Services (Partner) are experts in the manufacture of high-quality engineering components and subassemblies supplying HVM sectors and are an existing customer and target end-user.
The concept for customers to accurately calculate the carbon footprint of individual engineered items they produce arose from multiple conversations between AGSS and members of the engineering supply chain.
This project will develop a novel software tool that uses Real-time manufacturing data to identify carbon intensive processes and help inform decision on selecting components and switching to alternative processes with improved carbon credentials. This will aid companies in adhering to new government legislation regarding emissions (net zero by 2050).
Key features/output measures:
* Automatically generate Product Carbon Footprint for each part, highlighting climate-relevant hotspots of the whole production system.
* Predictive analysis allows users to input estimate data for new products and predict the overall carbon impact of that product, individually or over the full life-cycle.
* Real-time control: Monitoring production machines in real-time to identify performance changes that may negatively impact carbon credentials.
* Allow companies to calculate the monetary/carbon cost of scrapped and reworked parts.
284,386
2020-09-01 to 2022-02-28
BIS-Funded Programmes
Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) competitiveness is reliant on its supply chain's performance. It's a known issue that OEMs cannot find sufficient capacity to support their requirements (e.g. BAE). To achieve aircraft build-rate projections the industry needs to increase capacity and visibility of available capacity. Current Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) within Aerospace is c40-60% with many companies not measuring OEE or reliant on manual data-set updates.
We will transform UK aerospace manufacturing productivity and agility by developing a real-time visualisation of aerospace manufacturing capacity and demand, compatible with our existing MRP software. Increasing OEE levels by up to 50%, providing real-time visibility of aerospace capacity and bottlenecks.