Provisioning avionics components in an e-business environment

Provisioning of avionics for commercial, government, and private aircraft is a critically important task to maintain reliable service levels in an era of increasing reliance on air transportation. In this paper we examine the evolving nature of parts provisioning for complex avionics systems in an environment where the supply chain is influenced by e-business technology that allows reliability data, inventory costs, and manufacturing issues to jointly affect the level of stocked parts. The availability of parts is a vitally important concern to keep expensive fleets of aircraft operational. We describe the basic provisioning problem for both existing and new aircraft and describe a simulation model that we have constructed to help us determine a realistic inventory level for thousands of components for numerous aircraft configurations. We show how simulation overcomes several limitations of traditional provisioning models.