Beyond flight operations: Assessing the environmental impact of aircraft maintenance through life cycle assessment

As the aviation industry strives to minimise its environmental footprint, understanding the full life cycle impacts, including maintenance, becomes essential for sustainable development. This paper addresses the critical research gap in the environmental assessment of aircraft maintenance by conducting a comprehensive life cycle assessment...

Analyzing Emerging Challenges for Data-Driven Predictive Aircraft Maintenance Using Agent-Based Modeling and Hazard Identification

The increasing use of on-board sensor monitoring and data-driven algorithms has stimulated the recent shift to data-driven predictive maintenance for aircraft. This paper discusses emerging challenges for data-driven predictive aircraft maintenance. We identify new hazards associated with the introduction of data-driven technologies into...

Alarm-based predictive maintenance scheduling for aircraft engines with imperfect Remaining Useful Life prognostics

The increasing availability of condition monitoring data for aircraft components has incentivized the development of Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prognostics in the past years. However, only few studies consider the integration of such prognostics into maintenance planning. In this paper we propose a dynamic, predictive maintenance scheduling...

Multi-objective design of aircraft maintenance using Gaussian process learning and adaptive sampling

Aircraft maintenance design aims to identify strategies that render the aircraft reliable for flight in a cost-efficient manner. These are often conflicting objectives. Moreover, existing studies on maintenance design often limit themselves to only one type of maintenance strategy, overlooking other potentially dominating designs. We propose...

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,...

Online model-based remaining-useful-life prognostics for aircraft cooling units using time-warping degradation clustering

Remaining-useful-life prognostics for aircraft components are central for efficient and robust aircraft maintenance. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end approach to obtain online, model-based remaining-useful-life prognostics by learning from clusters of components with similar degradation trends. Time-series degradation measurements are...

Robust Long-Term Aircraft Heavy Maintenance Check Scheduling Optimization under Uncertainty

Long-term heavy maintenance check schedules are crucial in the aviation industry since airlines need them to prepare the required maintenance tools, workforce, and aircraft spare parts. However, most airlines adopt a manual approach to plan the heavy maintenance check schedules in current practice. This manual process relies on the experience of...

A web-based decision support system for aircraft dispatch and maintenance

Aircraft dispatch involves determining the optimal dispatch option when an aircraft experiences an unexpected failure. Currently, maintenance technicians at the apron have limited access to support information and finding the right information in extensive maintenance manuals is a time-consuming task, often leading to technically induced...

A bin packing approach to solve the aircraft maintenance task allocation problem

This paper addresses the scheduling of aircraft maintenance tasks that must be carried out in multiple maintenance checks to keep a fleet of aircraft airworthy. The allocation of maintenance tasks to maintenance opportunities, also known as the task allocation problem (TAP), is a complex combinatorial problem that needs to be solved daily by...

Aircraft maintenance check scheduling using reinforcement learning

This paper presents a Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach to optimize the long-term scheduling of maintenance for an aircraft fleet. The problem considers fleet status, maintenance capacity, and other maintenance constraints to schedule hangar checks for a specified time horizon. The checks are scheduled within an interval, and the goal is...

An integrated assessment of safety and efficiency of aircraft maintenance strategies using agent-based modelling and stochastic Petri nets

Aircraft maintenance is key for safe and efficient aircraft operations. While most studies propose cost-efficient maintenance strategies, the safety and efficiency of these strategies need to be quantified. This paper proposes a formal framework to assess the safety and efficiency of maintenance strategies by means of agent-based modelling,...

Deducing the physical characteristics of an impactor from the resultant damage on aircraft structures

This paper proposes an analytical model that uses historical damage dimension data to deduce physical impactor characteristics (size and energy) that has caused a certain resulting damage. Maintenance tasks occur in operations due to impact, however the source of the damage caused in the event remains in most cases unknown. Consequently, by...

Using convolutional neural networks to automate aircraft maintenance visual inspection

Convolutional Neural Networks combined with autonomous drones are increasingly seen as enablers of partially automating the aircraft maintenance visual inspection process. Such an innovative concept can have a significant impact on aircraft operations. Though supporting aircraft maintenance engineers detect and classify a wide range of...

A practical dynamic programming based methodology for aircraft maintenance check scheduling optimization

This paper presents a practical dynamic programming based methodology to optimize the long-term maintenance check schedule for a fleet of heterogeneous aircraft. It is the first time that the long-term aircraft maintenance check schedule is optimized, integrating different check types in a single schedule solution. The proposed methodology...

A decision support framework and prototype for aircraft dispatch assessment

When an aircraft experiences an unexpected issue during flight operations, a technician determines whether the aircraft can safely perform the next flight. This operational decision process - known as dispatch assessment - has to happen within limited available time between aircraft arrival and departure. Currently, technicians face two main...

Identifying strategic maintenance capacity for accidental damage occurrence in aircraft operations

Airline operators face accidental damages on their fleet of aircraft as part of operational practice. Individual occurrences are hard to predict; consequently, the approach towards repairing accidental damage is reactive in aircraft maintenance practice. However, by aggregating occurrence data and predicting future occurrence rates, it is...

Modeling safety culture as a socially emergent phenomenon: A case study in aircraft maintenance

Safety culture is often understood as encompassing organizational members’ shared attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and values associated with safety. Safety culture theory development is fraught with inconsistencies and superficiality of measurement methods, because the dynamic and political nature of culture is often ignored. Traditionally,...