Balancing preventive and corrective maintenance of aircraft assets: a cyber-physical systems approach

Many aircraft assets are subjected to both preventive (scheduled) and corrective (un-scheduled) replacement tasks to ensure adequate reliability and availability. The problem under this approach, particularly for assets that exist in high quantities, is that preventive replacement tasks will often require removal of the entire population of assets from the aircraft regardless as to whether any of them were replaced on a corrective basis beforehand. To avoid the costs associated with premature asset removal, this article fosters the use of a Cyber-Physical Systems approach to the management of aircraft assets underpinned by Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. This will allow the identification of assets based on their installation date (whether being due to a corrective or preventive installation), meaning that only the required assets are removed during the preventive replacement task. This allows the preventive replacement task to be performed more efficiently, also allowing the scheduling and planning of the task to be improved. An example in the context of aircraft passenger seat covers is used to illustrate our proposal.