A Framework for Aircraft Maintenance Strategy including CBM

Maintenance Planning plays a vital role in optimizing the benefits of Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM). The challenge is to identify the right combinations of different types (Preventive, CBM and Run-to-Fail) of maintenance tasks for different subsystems or components of complex systems like an aircraft to achieve the most optimized solution in terms of availability, cost and safety. Maintenance Strategy plans most cost effective maintenance type for each fault of a sub-system in such a way that availability and safety are optimized. Also, the strategy should satisfy the important goals viz. technical feasibility and certifiability of the solution. This study presents a RCM based maintenance strategy framework with some modifications over the existing guidelines. The framework has been implemented and is demonstrated with a case study of EPGDS (Electrical Power Generation and Distribution System). The results with arbitrary costing for each task are outlined with the objective of demonstrating the effectiveness of the framework.