Prescriptive Maintenance: Building Alternative Plans for Smart Operations

Abstract

Smart operations require the ability to generate alternative plans whenever a change in operations occurs in an unplanned manner. Alternate maintenance plans, in a highly dynamic context such as airline operations, require the ability to foresee small developments in terms of labor allocation, repairable items, and downtime, when and where they were not previously scheduled. In addition to being able to cause the disruption of the air transport network and consequent financial losses, it causes loss of trust in the company brand. Prescriptive maintenance is a potential technological response when using Artificial Intelligence to suggest alternative plans promptly so that decisionmakers can reduce the impact on air operations. This paper proposes a framework for the construction of an integrated prescriptive maintenance solution that is certifiable by using auditable methods and extensible to complex systems of other industries. The adoption of prescriptive maintenance not only enhances the use of health management systems, widely available in modern aircraft fleets that have the potential to predict the remaining useful life of items of interest, but also allows identifying more than one response alternative to conflicts of interest in the conduction of the smart operations of air transport companies.

The Need for Ecosystem 4.0 to Support Maintenance 4.0: An Aviation Assembly Line Case

“…The Smart Prescriptive Maintenance Framework (SPMF), introduced in Marques [9], was developed and tested on a study case to support the introduction of prescriptive maintenance. The present work assembly line presents complex production systems (robots and other equipment), a specific operating environment that provides production requirements or production levels, and a well-defined maintenance capability constituted by maintenance labour, tooling, tribal knowledge and infrastructure suitable for the implementation of the SPMF.…”

“…the operating environment in which the system is being deployed; 3. the organization's maintenance capabilities [9].…”

“…According to Marques [9], although the SPMF was conceived to implement the prescriptive maintenance on a commercial jet fleet, it can be generalized and used to support any complex system. Each domain was selected because it contains essential system information and performance requirements that feed the prescriptive maintenance framework algorithm, so the best group of maintenance actions is defined.…”

“…The work in Choubey [8] brought the evidence that prescriptive maintenance is still in its infancy and lacks real-world implementations and lessons learned to empower its usage on a large scale. Marques [9] established the Smart Prescriptive Maintenance Framework (SPMF) utilized in the present work to provide a path to prescriptive maintenance implementation in any industry using the ecosystem 4.0 capabilities.…”

New Business Models from Prescriptive Maintenance Strategies Aligned with Sustainable Development Goals

“…The coming evolution of strategies in maintenance not only enhances the use of equipment health management systems, that have the potential to predict the remaining useful life of items of interest, but also allows identifying more than one alternative response to conflicts of interest in the conduction of operations by actors' ecosystem [12]. In this engagement digitalisation helps to create assets that become aware of themselves and able to foresee their future operational status according to the estimated demand by using their own digital twins (DT) and the process DT implementations [13].…”