Assessing the Impact of Metrics on the Choice of Prognostic Methodologies

Over the past years, advanced prognostic models and approaches have been developed. Most existing approaches are tailored to one specific system and cannot adaptively be used on different systems. This can lead to years of research and expertise being put into implementing prognostic models without the capacity to predict system failures,...

Generic Diagnostic Framework for Anomaly Detection—Application in Satellite and Spacecraft Systems

Spacecraft systems collect health-related data continuously, which can give an indication of the systems’ health status. While they rarely occur, the repercussions of such system anomalies, faults, or failures can be severe, safety-critical and costly. Therefore, the data are used to anticipate any kind of anomalous behaviour. Typically this is...

Condition-Based Maintenance in Aviation: Challenges and Opportunities

Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) is a policy that uses information about the health condition of systems and structures to identify optimal maintenance interventions over time, increasing the efficiency of maintenance operations. Despite CBM being a well-established concept in academic research, the practical uptake in aviation needs to catch...

A novel decision support system for optimizing aircraft maintenance check schedule and task allocation

Modern aircraft have thousands of parts, systems, and components that need to be recurrently inspected or replaced. To keep the fleet airworthy, maintenance planners have to schedule the maintenance checks for each aircraft and the associated tasks. In practice, these two complex problems are solved following the experience of planners,...

Dynamic aircraft recovery problem - An operational decision support framework

This paper presents a new approach for solving the recovery of the airline schedule when disruptions have occurred. The goal is to develop an operational tool that provides the airline with a solution in less than one minute. The proposed recovery model uses a heuristic that iteratively solves selections of the airline's fleet in order to...

Retirement optimization through aircraft transfers and employment

Military aircraft retirements are an afterthought for many lifecycle planners. More active management of end-of-life fleets can yield increased confidence in fleet capability and retirement timelines. This work provides fleet managers with a tool to manage remaining aircraft flight hours to yield a desired fleet retirement pattern. It solves...

A decentralized approach to formation flight routing of long-haul commercial flights

This paper describes the development of an optimization-based cooperative planning system for the efficient routing and scheduling of extended flight formations. This study considers the use of formation flight as a means to reduce the overall fuel consumption in long-haul airline operations. It elaborates on the operational implementation of...