Integrating maintenance work progress monitoring into aircraft maintenance planning decision support

A decision support framework is proposed, allowing for the integration of aircraft maintenance work progress monitoring into the aircraft maintenance planning decision support process. The framework is able to monitor the progression of planned maintenance by analysing real-time data on work progress. This can be used to explore optimal task planning in case of delays or maintenance being ahead of schedule. Using a combination of reliability analysis, cost analysis, decision alternative generation and ranking yields a decision support tool which is able to deal with the stochastic nature of maintenance task execution. Case study results indicate that the framework is able to generate decision alternatives with a lower total cost than the reference alternative, while at the same time optimising the maintenance planning, resulting in a possible reduction of the maintenance costs of 45 to 90% (depending on parameter settings).