Real-Time Maintenance Optimization Considering Health Monitoring and Additive Manufacturing

Adrian Cubillo,Manuel Esperon-Miguez,Suresh Perinpanayagam,Philip John

doi:10.36001/ijphm.2017.v8i2.2632

Abstract

Prognostics Health Management (PHM) and Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) are extensive areas of research. Whereas a lot of work has been done in diagnostics and prognostics, economic viability is an important consideration. The availability of aircraft in the aerospace sector is a critical factor. Thus, cost and downtime are the main parameters to assess the impact of IVHM. Additionally, new repair technologies, such as additive manufacturing (AM), have the potential to become standard repair procedures, complementing IVHM, and its viability also has to be assessed. However, to accurately study the impact of these factors, the characteristics of aerospace maintenance have to be taken into account. Several approaches are followed in aircraft maintenance, depending on cost, downtime and aircraft availability constraints. For instance, some parts can be repaired on the ground and assembled again on the same aircraft, while single Line Replaceable Units (LRUs) need to be removed, replaced and later repaired in the workshop without affecting the availability of the aircraft. With the gradual introduction of IVHM, the viability of any new IVHM technology needs to be assessed.This paper describes an extensive cost and downtime model to take into account all these scenarios, including the impact of using different types of IVHM systems. The impact of IVHM and new repair technologies is discussed comparing maintenance cost and downtime of parts of LRUs and parts repaired when the aircraft is on the ground.Secondly, a real-time maintenance case study based on IVHM, a cost and downtime model and additive manufacturing is presented. This application allows the optimization of maintenance activities by updating the available resources and their corresponding cost and time, along with the actual prediction of the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) using a health monitoring system, instead of depending on historical component/sub-system failure probabilities.

Highlights

Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) refers to several aspects of the vehicle and its management and aims to assess the current and future health state integrated within a framework of available resources and operational demands
For the case studies presented in this paper, repairing the component as part of a Line Replaceable Units (LRUs) is more convenient than repairing the component on the ground and the downtime is significantly reduced because no repair procedure is done on the ground
To decide whether having a LRU is more profitable than repairing each single sub-component on the ground, the same study should be done over all the components and failure modes of the LRU and cannot be assessed by this single-part example

Summary

Introduction

Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) refers to several aspects of the vehicle and its management and aims to assess the current and future health state integrated within a framework of available resources and operational demands. The architecture of IVHM systems follows the Open System Architecture for Condition-Based Maintenance (OSA CBM) (Dunson & Harrington, 2008; Xia et al, 2010). Following this classification, the approach presented in this paper is at level of “advisory generation”. The benefit of IVHM for the maintainer is normally shown in the reduction of maintenance cost and increased availability of the fleet. This is due to reduced maintenance time thanks to diagnostics capabilities that allow fault localization and fault isolation early on in the operation, the reduced cost and time of planned maintenance operations and the avoided cost of secondary damage (Esperon-Miguez, 2013)

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