Aircraft Fleet Maintenance Planning Using Combined Cost Benefit Model and Branch and Bound

Abstract

The tasks of maintenance and repair without optimal planning can be costly and result in prolonged maintenance times, reduced availability and possible flight delays. Aircraft manufacturers and maintainers see significant benefits in constantly improving Health Management and Maintenance (HMM) practices by deploying the most effective maintenance planning strategies. The planning of the maintenance and repair is a complex task due to chain dependency of engines to aircraft, and aircraft to the flight schedules. This paper presents a scheduling method for determining the time of maintenance based on the historical engine operation data in order to maximize the use of estimated remaining useful life of the engines as well as lowering the cost and duration of the downtime. The Time-on-Wing (TOW) data is used in conjunction with probability density functions to determine the shape of the respective distribution of the time of maintenance to minimize the loss of expected remaining useful life. Data from each engine with most chance of failure is then selected and fed into an extended Branch and Bound (B&B) routine to determine the best optimum sequence for entering the facility in order to minimize the waiting time.

Decision Analysis Model for Optimal Aircraft Engine Maintenance Policies Using Discrete Event Simulation

“…The goal of HMM techniques is to reduce the life cycle costs for operating the entire aircraft fleet system. Considerable shares of these life cycle costs are expenditures for Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) of the individual aircraft engines [1].…”