Development Of A New Method For Aircraft Maintainability Allocation

Abstract

One of the most important topics in aircraft design is to define aircraft maintainability allocation which is a process to identify the allowable maximum task time for each aircraft component or system. Traditional methods are mostly experimental and out of design office’s control. In this study, an improved method has been developed to create an alternative method for experimental ones. For this purpose, as a first step an existing methodology developed for maintenance allocation has been improved by using a different technic. Improved method shows that newly established correlation between aircraft systems and task times has very high coefficient of determination compare to the existing method. At the second phase of the study several quantitative analysis have been performed by examining more than 1000 maintenance tasks which are accepted as standard maintenance actions by aviation industry, coming from Maintenance Steering Group methodology and six weight factors have been established for the new method. By using feed forward artificial neural networks for newly identified weight factors, maintenance task allocations has been established. Results shows that newly proposed method can be applicable for any maintenance process during early design stage

Keywords

• Aircraft maintenance
• Neural networks
• Artificial Intelligence