ASPIRE

As concurrent engineering is now fully penetrating the industrial world, there is an increasing pressure put upon the SMEs that are involved in the production. Such companies have to deal with very short-term orders, while maintaining a high degree of customer satisfaction and low prices.

The five ASPIRE consortium SME core proposers are each facing such a situation and have initiated this project in order to get a decision support to tackle it. At the end of the project, these SMEs intend to use a decision support software tool dedicated to respond to their specific production planning needs, and to the need they have to negociate with their customers and suppliers as they schedule their production. The main technical strategy consists in applying different levels of approximations, ranging from Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stroks (RANS) models with semi empirical information on the spectra of the pressure fluctuations, to Large Eddy Simulations (LES), where the spectra can be calculated.

There is actually no industrial software product that matches the ASPIRE requirements. This undoubtfully shall constitute a significant advance in the domain of management of SMEs' production, as the existing scheduling softwares of the market, although managing the degrees of freedom which are available at the workshop level (alternative resources, changes in working hours and so on), do not provide any support in specific topics such as:

• taking into account data pervaded by imprecision and uncertainty (e.g. expected orders or expected workload) in order to obtain the expected cycle time of an order, providing an efficient way to systematically test different scenarios that can satisfy a delay;
• assessing these scenarios using a multi criteria approach (i.e. taking into account the customer's satisfaction but also the satisfaction of internal constraints such as the optimisation of the resource use) providing a support in order to re use past experience, by storing and retrieving comparable situations when a decision has to be made.