Study of Industry 4.0 and its Impact on Lean Transformation in Aerospace Manufacturing

Lean manufacturing practices focus on minimizing all forms of waste from the production system. The applicability of lean manufacturing concepts and principles has often been questioned in sectors including aerospace manufacturing primarily due to their high variety - low volume environments. The key challenges include the difficulty in changing the factory layout, lack of plant-specific manufacturing strategies, lack of benchmarking between manufacturing plants and non-existence of learning through experimentation culture. Consequently, the aerospace manufacturing industries have struggled to implement lean principles over the years successfully. Industry 4.0 is a new paradigm that is significantly influencing several manufacturing industries across the globe. Applying the concepts of Industry 4.0 along with the conventional lean transformation technology could potentially address these challenges. The focus of this research is to study the possibilities of integrating Industry 4.0 tools with existing lean manufacturing philosophies within the aerospace manufacturing sector in order to improve various aspects of manufacturing processes in a cyber-physical environment. A case study is performed considering a quality inspection department in a typical aerospace industry. The case study is simulated using discrete event simulation tool — Arena. The study found that a hybrid approach involving the holistic merger of the lean principles along with the Industry 4.0 tools known as Lean Industry 4.0 is the best way forward for the aerospace manufacturing sector. The outcomes of this research provide an understanding of the role of industry 4.0 paradigm and their implementation in several other high-technology and high-risk manufacturing sectors including life sciences, space, and defense industries.