A Virtual Warehouse Simulation Tool for Aerospace Rotables Management

We developed a simulation tool that simulates rotable failures in commercial flights, a replace-and-repair cycle, and an inventory re-balancing policy (Virtual Warehouse concept). With this tool, we are able to determine the percentages of instances where flights arriving at their destination airports with failed components can get replacements. This tool was developed using a commercial simulation software ProModel. The time taken to run a typical scenario is in the order of hours, which makes this tool unsuitable for use in a real-life decision support system. Using our proprietary parallel and distributed simulation (PADS) platform, the tool was re-engineered. The time taken by the new simulation tool takes just a few seconds for the same scenario, an improvement of several thousand times. In this paper we describe our simulation tool and discuss the results from running some realistic scenarios. The analysis revealed that using the Virtual Warehouse concept, up to 50% less inventory is required compared to conventional policies (IATP pooling).