Factory production line as SoS; a case study in airplane engine component manufacturing

Factories are examples of system of systems with all related problems of integral ownership, lack of overview, emerging properties, and many stakeholders making decisions locally. In the past 7 years, engineers at the GKN Aerospace factory in Kongsberg have been modeling parts of the factory to tackle the complexity of such a facility. In successive papers, they have shown that modeling helps in understanding, reasoning, communication, and decision making. In this paper, we zoom out and describe from a systems of systems perspective the challenges of modeling the system to improve factory level performance indicators, such as inventory levels and production cycle times.