A Sample Average Approximation Approach for Aircraft Product Configuration Optimization with Customer Order Uncertainty

Commercial aircraft manufacturers often face order uncertainty in particular situations, such as quantity or demand change, or lack of confirmed customer options. As a countermeasure, aircraft manufacturers can adopt a two-stage strategy to produce batch General-Configuration Aircraft (GCA), so as to maintain continuous aircraft production. Nevertheless, additional work on disassembling and re-assembling must be performed, to convert the GCA into specific configurations specified later by the customer. Thus, an appropriate GCA that leads to a minimal overall manufacturing workload is essential. In this paper, a Sample Average Approximation (SAA) model for GCA optimization is proposed, to obtain a robust GCA whose prediction results can help minimize the total production time. Compared with the empirical method, the proposed SAA approach significantly accelerates the production operation and is adaptive to various scenarios. The robustness of the SAA approach was evaluated, and the results prove that the general configuration obtained by the SAA approach has sustainable variances in the manufacturing workload.