C-5 Isochronal inspection process modeling

United States Air Mobility Command (AMC) has a limited number of C-5 aircraft, and so opportunities to either preserve or increase aircraft availability are of interest to them. In an attempt to reduce inspection costs and promote inspection scheduling predictability, the Air Force is reducing the number of C-5 Isochronal inspection (ISO) sites from five to three. C-5 ISOs require at least two weeks and involve an exhaustive inspection of the entire aircraft. AMC headquarters staff asked us to model the new ISO process to help them understand how the reduced number of ISO locations will affect inspection timeliness. We used the problem as the class project for a graduate discrete event simulation course at the Air Force Institute of Technology. We review our process and results, and present some insights on conducting simulation research as a class assignment.