Engine Maintenance Forecasting via Opportunistic Inspection Merging
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current maintenance forecasting methods for engines, such as those used in aircraft, often result in excessive inspections and high costs due to a lack of accuracy and inefficiency in planning maintenance operations, leading to increased downtime and material expenses, while failing to adequately account for opportunistic inspections and interdependency between components.
Innovation Solution
A method and system that build lifetime models for engine components, analyze these models to define failure scenarios, and iteratively simulate maintenance actions to create a global model of relaxed maintenance operations, incorporating opportunistic inspections while ensuring safety thresholds are met, thereby optimizing inspection intervals and reducing costs.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If regular inspections are performed on each component based on individual risk analysis, then safety requirements are fulfilled, but the number of inspections increases excessively leading to higher maintenance costs and downtime
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines multiple individual component inspections into a single integrated maintenance operation. When one component requires inspection or maintenance, the system opportunistically inspects other components during the same intervention, merging multiple inspection tasks into one unified action that reduces overall downtime and cost while maintaining safety standards.
Solution Approach 2:
The maintenance system performs multiple functions simultaneously: it inspects the primary component that triggered the maintenance need, opportunistically inspects other components, updates their inspection schedules, and manages inventory requirements all in a single intervention. This multi-functionality optimizes resource utilization and reduces the total number of separate maintenance operations.
2Reliability
If regular inspections are performed on each component based on individual risk analysis, then safety requirements are fulfilled, but downtime periods increase due to repeated interventions
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines multiple individual component inspections into a single integrated maintenance operation. When one component requires inspection or maintenance, the system opportunistically inspects other components during the same intervention, merging multiple inspection tasks into one unified action that reduces overall downtime and cost while maintaining safety standards.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary planning of maintenance operations by analyzing component interdependencies and forecasting maintenance needs. It proactively schedules opportunistic inspections and prepares inventory requirements in advance, allowing maintenance teams to execute comprehensive inspections in a single coordinated intervention rather than making repeated separate trips to the engine.
3Measurement precision
If component lifetime models are analyzed individually, then failure risk is assessed, but interdependency between components and opportunistic inspections are not accounted for
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges individual component lifetime models into a global maintenance model that incorporates interdependencies between components. This global model simultaneously considers the failure risks of multiple components and their relationships, enabling the system to identify opportunistic inspection opportunities and optimize maintenance scheduling while maintaining precise failure risk assessment.
Solution Approach 2:
The system uses feedback from component inspections and failure data to continuously refine the global maintenance model. Inspection results from opportunistic checks are fed back into the model to update component health status, adjust inter-inspection intervals, and improve future maintenance forecasting accuracy, creating a self-optimizing system that handles complexity through iterative learning.
Data Source
AI summary
A method and system forecasting maintenance operations to be applied to an engine or a part of the engine including a set of components, the system including: a processor building a lifetime model for each component of the set of components; a processor analysing the lifetime model associated with each component to build a set of failure models corresponding to the set of components, each component being associated with a failure model defining an inter-inspection interval reflecting an advanced degradation risk rate lower than a predetermined safety threshold; a processor defining a maintenance strategy including opportunistic inspections on the set of components; and a processor iteratively simulating maintenance actions on the set of components by using the set of failure models and the maintenance strategy to build a global model of relaxed maintenance operations which takes the opportunistic inspections into account while fulfilling a predetermined safety threshold of each component.