Maintenance Optimization Model for Aircraft Supportability
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current methods for evaluating aircraft design and maintenance strategies, such as DOCsys, fail to consider essential factors like fuel consumption, regulation aspects, and comprehensive maintenance strategies, leading to incomplete assessments of supportability performance.
Innovation Solution
A Maintenance Optimization Model (MOM) is developed to evaluate design choices and maintenance policies, considering future operational conditions and user expectations, by determining relevant outputs and inputs, examining relationships, and selecting criteria to design the model for improved supportability performance.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If traditional DOC methods are used for aircraft evaluation, then calculation simplicity is maintained, but comprehensiveness of cost elements is insufficient
Solution Approach 1:
The evaluation method segments Direct Operating Costs into distinct categories (fuel costs, direct maintenance costs, capital costs, delay costs) and evaluates each separately using standardized formulas, allowing comprehensive assessment while maintaining calculability through structured breakdown
2Measurement precision
If DOCsys method is used to incorporate system-specific parameters, then evaluation accuracy improves, but applicability to future aircraft designs decreases
Solution Approach 1:
The method uses standardized parameter definitions and formulas that can be applied across different aircraft types and design phases. By establishing consistent calculation approaches for fuel consumption, maintenance costs, and operational parameters, the method achieves both precision in assessment and adaptability to future aircraft designs
3Reliability
If comprehensive maintenance strategies are integrated, then life cycle cost optimization improves, but model complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The method performs preliminary evaluation of maintenance strategies during the design phase by calculating expected life cycle costs using standardized formulas. This allows optimization of maintenance approaches before actual operation, reducing complexity by establishing maintenance frameworks in advance rather than developing them during operation
Data Source
AI summary
A method of developing maintenance optimization model includes finding relevant criteria to drive the design towards operational performances at minimal cost for the end user, selecting inputs necessary to assess criteria selected, defining mathematical models to jointly drive the equipment/sub-system/system design and its support towards better supportability, and presenting the maintenance optimization model results to enable the exploration of the cause and effect relationships between design decisions and their operational and support impacts. The selected inputs may cover all the potential factors influencing the criteria values. The mathematical modeling can facilitate leveraging the intuitive “cause and effect” relationship between design and support, and affordability. The maintenance optimization model method, system, and computer program product provides a solid basis for the supportability evaluation of equipment/system/sub-system choices, particularly when integrated in a systematic way into the design process and used from the beginning of the development cycle.