The Prediction of the Man-Hour in Aircraft Assembly Based on Support Vector Machine Particle Swarm Optimization

Abstract

As the representative of manufacturing industry, aircraft assembly lacks of effective method to forecast man-hour. The forecasting accuracy of existing methods is universally pretty low. On the basis of full analysis of aircraft assembly’s feature, this study proposes a forecasting model based on support vector machine (SVM), which is optimized by particle swarm optimization. It can carry out quantitative prediction of the process’ man-hour during aircraft’s assembly. Firstly, we decompose aircraft’s assembly work by the concept of work breakdown structure. Further, the process parameters related to man-hour were listed and we made necessary correlation analysis of these historical data. Parameters with high contribution are then used as input of forecasting model. A new forecasting model utilizing SVM is proposed, which carries out the process as the minimum research granularity. Its performance is compared with back propagation neural network. The process of automatic drilling & riveting is adopted as an example in order to present and validate the model. Experimental results reflect that SVM has high forecast precision and good fitness, so that it is suitable for small sample prediction. Through the optimization, it can effectively predict man-hour of assembly work in a short time while maintaining sufficient accuracy.