Manufacturing Bill-of-Materials Plus Operations Visualization Using D3

Abstract

Visualization of factory production flow facilitates test optimization decision-making, given the complexity inherent in many organization’s manufacturing environments. Constructing production flow visualizations can be difficult and time-consuming, and has often involved expensive simulation software. In this paper we describe successful work populating NIST CMSD Core Manufacturing Simulation Data from existing factory data, visualizing factory flows using the open source D3.js visualization toolset. By mapping existing factory test data using the CMSD standard, the open source visualization toolset represents a lower-cost mechanism for understanding and optimizing test operations, detailed in this paper. The visualization was developed with a small team and deployed into production at a large aerospace manufacturer over the course of four months and is now used by multiple business units for factory flow optimizations of their complex engineered products.