You have recently been promoted to Project Manager at New Millennium Aerospace (NMA) Inc., a leading manufacturer of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for the government. Your new job is to plan and execute the development project for a UAV, to be used for surveillance purposes. A rough specification and sketch of the new vehicle is shown in Figure 1. The payload is provided by the government as modified GFE (government furnished equipment), while the engine will be supplied by a well-established commercial company (ECC) under a subcontract. The remainder of the vehicle, including integration and testing is NMA’s - and therefore your - responsibility. Your task today is to create a project schedule, find the critical path and to estimate the finish time of the project. The subsequent project description is hypothetical, but will help you establish the plan.
UAV Project Description (NMA - X1)
The UAV "pusher" vehicle concept is to Figure 1. In a pusher in aircraft, The engine is The rear - mounted
Which can lead to who propulsive efficiency. The vehicle can be decomposed into The following assemblies: fuselage (into The avionics), wings, empennage, payload (a visual and an IR camera, incl. Transmitter) and The engine (incl. Propeller).
What follows is a description of the likely tasks necessary to develop the vehicle, incl. The dependencies between the tasks. The task (" job ") descriptions are underlined the first time they are mentioned, and the task ID and normal duration inworking weekes are given in parentheses.
Example: engine integration (x,17), means that there is a task called "engine integration", identified by the symbol "x", whose nominal duration is 17 work weeks. After the project start (a,0) you first have to complete the overall requirements definition (b,10) step. Once this is accomplished you can carry out the following jobs in parallel: negotiate the engine specification (c,5) with ECC, define your payload specification (d,5), determine the vehicle layout (e,8) and write the software specification (g,12). You can initiate (GFE) avionics design (f,15) after (b,10), however the tasks (c,5) and (d,5) must also have been completed before the GFE design can be started. This is so that the avionics equipment will be able to control both the engine and payload in a synchronized fashion.
Once the engine specs (c,5) have been defined, the supplier (ECC) informs you that it will take 30 weeks for engine development (i,30) based on experience with a previous variant. Once engine development is complete, delivery and checkout (n,2) can take place at NMA’s facilities. After (d,5) is done, payload development (j,15) can take place in parallel with engine development. Once the payload is developed (j,15) and the engine delivered (n,2), both the engine and payload are integrated (electrically) in the power system integration (o,10) step.
Fuselage design (k, 17) and empennage/wing design (l, 15) the begin in parallel after the vehicle layout (e, 8) has had been established. The Internal fittings (m, 8) can be designed after these two jobs are completed. Also, the structural airframe prototyping (r, 10) consists of building a physical frame for the vehicle after the jobs (k, 17) and (l, 15) are completed.
Once avionics design (f, 15) has had been completed, and this leads to avionics delivery and checkout (p) and subsequent avionics/software integration (q), 5). Obviously, in order for this last step to take place, software development (h, 25) which depends both on (g, 12) and (f, 15) must have also had been completed.
The project is continued by performing vehicle integration (s, 10) which requires The prior completion of The power system integration (o, 10), airframe prototyping (r, 10) and avionics/software integration (q), 5).
After the vehicle integration (s, 10) and internal fitting design (m, 8) have had been achieved, the final vehicle assembly (t, 5) can begin. After final assembly, the completed vehicle is subjected to laboratory testing (u, 5), followed by the an is suing flight test campaign (v, 10) leading to the completion of the prototype development project, finish (x, 0). Note that throughout the project starting with (a, 0) and
Ending with (x, 0) project management itself (w, *) must be accomplished as a necessary task.
The asterisk * in (w, *) are that The duration of this task is as long as it takes to complete all The other tasks.
Notes:
- a task descriptions are underlined
25) - (n, means that the task is tagged as "n" and is expected to take 25 work weekes
- the tasks are hypothetical, but in a notionally meaningful sequence
Tasks: Plan the Project
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