Developing prescriptive maintenance strategies in the aviation industry based on a discrete-event simulation framework for post-prognostics decision making

Abstract

The aviation industry is facing an ever-increasing competition to lower its operating cost. Simultaneously, new factors, such as sustainability and customer experience, become more important to differentiate from competitors. As aircraft maintenance contributes about 20% to the overall cost of airline operations and can significantly influence other objectives of an airline as well, maintenance providers are required to constantly lower their cost share and contribute to a more reliable and sustainable aircraft operation. Subsequently, new condition-monitoring technologies have emerged that are expected to improve maintenance operations by reducing cost and increasing the aircraft’s availability. As many of these technologies are still in their technological infancy, it is necessary to determine the expected benefit for the airline operations with the given technological maturity and to develop suitable maintenance strategies that incorporate the newly gained insights. With this paper, a discrete-event simulation framework is developed that uses established parameters to describe a condition-monitoring technology’s performance and subsequently develops a suitable prescriptive maintenance strategy. Therefore, it enables the adjustment of the optimization goal for the developed strategy to incorporate performance features beyond the frequently used financial indicators. The developed capabilities will be demonstrated for the tire pressure measurement task of an Airbus A320.