Simulation of the support fleet maintenance of modern stealth fighter aircraft

The F-35 Lightning II is a 5th Generation, multirole stealth fighter aircraft that is expected to replace the aging "legacy fighters" and their roles in our national defense. The plane was designed and is currently produced by Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Air Force recognize that a proper information infrastructure is critical to sustaining a functional and mission ready aircraft fleet. Thus, to provide the information technology backbone and capabilities to support current and future Warfighters across the U.S. and allied military services, the U.S. Air Force started adapting a modern electronic information system. The F-35 has been equipped with an Autonomic Logistics Information System to allow operators the ability to plan ahead, to maintain, and to plan and sustain its systems of the newly created fleet. Within the system is a problem ticket system that serves as a means to resolve issues with F-35 systems. An Action Request System, which utilizes this ticketing system, to efficiently funnel the tickets to an appropriate engineering organization and back to the originator for issue resolution. This paper studies that ticketing process with the goal of creating a model that can be used to study and optimize the time it takes to move a ticket through the process from creation to closure (resolution). To best understand this problem, we have worked closely with the Luke Air Force Base Maintenance Group to create a discrete event simulation that exposes different bottlenecks in the current process. Using this simulation, we identify which stages in the process will benefit most from a reallocation of resources. The simulation tool will be used by the client to perform future analysis.