AUSA 2024: Lockheed Martin sees AI enterprise providing competitive advantage

Lockheed Martin employed a digital environment to design its LM 400 multimission, mid-sized satellite. (Lockheed Martin)

Lockheed Martin is transforming its business to take advantage of the latest digital and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to improve how it designs, builds, and sustains products, build resilience, and support production ramp-ups.

Intelligent factory

Lockheed Martin's 1LMX initiative aims to transform end-to-end business processes and systemically connect them through a digital thread to enhance interoperability, speed, and agility, David Tatro, vice-president of transformation, Lockheed Martin, told reporters on 9 October ahead of the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) 2024 conference in Washington, DC. This includes a digital thread, “where we have seamless shared capacity, capability, materials, and resources, so we can leverage the breadth of the entire corporation”, he added.

Tatro highlighted Lockheed Martin's intelligent factory framework project, which seeks to connect all equipment, environmental, and other systems into a digital thread, providing real-time condition and preventive maintenance data. This enables the company to “seamlessly connect the data of our machines, capacity, and utilisation of those machines into what we call our sales, inventory, [and] operations planning or SIOP”, he continued. AI-driven SIOP simulations can quickly aggregate forecasts and firm demand in “minutes versus hours and days”, Tatro said.

Lockheed Martin is investing in generative AI (GenAI) in three areas. Generative design uses an internally built AI engine that takes requirements such as size, shape, weight, thermal, stress, fatigue, and material type and supplies different models that meet those requirements, he explained. This offers a “new array of design opportunity, design ability, and design options”, he said.